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THE
DISTINCTIVE MESSAGES OF THE
OLD RELIGIONS
TEIE
DISTINCTIVE MESSAGES OF THE
OLD RELIGIONS
BY THE
REV. GEORGE MATHESON
M. A., D.D., F. R. S. E.
MINISTER OF THE PARISH OF ST. BERNARD's, EDINBURGH
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS
ED IN BU R G H AND I, O N DO N
M D C C C X C II
All Rights reserved
in-4-3-
P RE FA C E.
I NEED not say that my design in this little book
is not to describe the old religions, but to photo-
graph their spirit. To describe any religion would
require a volume twice the size of the present.
But a photograph must be instantaneous or abor-
tive. It is a generalised result; it only dates from
the time when all the materials have been arranged
in order. It does not involve work, it presupposes
work. When you have completed the perusal of
some elaborate encyclopædic article descriptive of
a religious faith, the question which rises in the
mind is this, Such being the facts, what then; what
is its mental contribution to the life of the world 2
In our days this question has been dwarfed by
another—the problem of development. In intel-
lectual circles the whole inquiry has been how any
one faith has passed into a different faith. Now,
vi Preface.
I am a firm believer in development, and thoroughly
alive to its value. But before a thing can pass it
must be. It must originally have had a worth for
itself alone, and not for another. No object, no
ideal, could have exercised for centuries a sway
over thousands, which had no other cause than the
contemplation of that final link by which it was
to pass away. To the men of these centuries the
power lay in the faith itself—in something which
was not only potent but present. This I have
called its distinctive message. By the distinctive
message of a religion I mean, not an enumeration of
its various points, but a selection of the one point in
which it differs from all others. My design is there-
fore more limited than that of some volumes of
equal size. I do not seek the permanent elements
in religion with the Bishop of Ripon, nor the uncon-
scious Christianity of Paganism with F. D. Maurice,
nor the moral ideal of the nations with Miss Julia
Wedgwood. I seek only to emphasise the dividing
lines which constitute the boundary between each
religion and all beside. In the concluding chapter
I have tried to reunite these lines by finding a
place for each in some part of the Christian mes-
sage. I have given a sufficient number of references
for a book which is not meant for a contribution to
Preface. vii
linguistic research, but simply as a mental study.
This is not a matter in which the linguist has any
advantage over the unprofessional, provided only
that the details, so far as they are known, have
become common property and are sufficient to
warrant a conclusion. It is a doubt on this last
point which has induced me to omit from the
present generalisation the otherwise interesting re-
ligions of Assyria and Chaldea.
() () NT ENTS,
CHAP. PAGE
I. INTRODUCTION, . º e o º e e I
II. THE COMMON ELEMENT IN RELIGIONS, g & 37
III. THE MESSAGE OF CHINA, , - - - º 61
IV. THE MESSAGE OF INDIA, . & e f º 93
v. THE SUBJECT CONTINUED, . o o e . 113
VI. THE SUBJECT COMPLETED, . º º º . 141
VII. THE MESSAGE OF PERSIA, . e • . . I62
VIII. CONTINUATION, . - e e º º . 178
IX. THE MESSAGE OF GREECE, . * º º . I93
X. THE MESSAGE OF ROME, . e • • . 215
XI. THE SUBJECT CONTINUED, . e º gº . 231
XII. THE MESSAGE OF THE TEUTON, . • - . .247
XIII. THE MESSAGE OF EGYPT, . e º - . 275
XIV. THE MESSAGE OF JUDEA, . * w - . 297
XV. THE SUBJECT CONTINUED, . e tº º , 312
XVI. CONCLUSION : CHRISTIANITY AND THE MESSAGES
OF THE PAST, - s * - e . 327
THE DISTINCTIVE MESSAGES OF
THE OLD RELIGIONS.
C H A P T E R I,
INTRODUCTION,
THERE are two questions which are often confounded
—What is the nature of religion ? and, What is
the origin of religion ? We frequently hear it said
that religion has its origin in certain feelings of the
mind. We are told sometimes that it is the product
of fear, sometimes that it is the fruit of superstition,
sometimes that it originates in a sense of absolute
dependence. However true such statements may be,
they can in no case reach the root of the matter.
They may toll us what roligion is ; they cannot tell
us whence religion comes. If we should succeed
in reducing the religious faculty to an experience
of fear, or a feeling of primitive superstition, or a
Sense of absolute dependence, we shall not have
A.
2 Messages of the Old Religions.
gained one step in the Solution of the great problem,
whence and how. What we want to know is, how
came this fear, whence arose this superstition, what
wakened this sense of dependence 2 There is no
reason why primitive man should have been more
subject to these influences than cultured man; there
is, a priori, every reason to the contrary. The ex-
perience of fear increases in proportion to the
mind's development. The feeling of superstition,
OT presentiment of a violated law, demands that
already in the heart of the man there should exist
some knowledge of law. The Sense of dependence
is not a primitive instinct, but only reaches its
flower when primitive instincts have been super-
seded. How comes it that these states of mind,
which we should naturally expect to arise in the
later stages of life, have found their crowning mani-
festation on the very threshold of human existence 2
There is a question which I have often asked
myself and which leads directly into the heart of
this subject, What is the reason that in the primi-
tive stages of life the individual man does not
begin by deifying himself? He possesses a wonder-
ful power of canonisation. There is scarcely an
object in heaven or earth or the waters under the
earth which he does not make divine. He deifies
the stars; he deifies the hills; he deifies the rivers;
he deifies even a block of wood and a piece of rag.
His bestowal of divine honours is by no means
Introduction. 3
regulated by the grandeur of the object. On the
contrary, with the full perception of the visible
universe, he begins by selecting for worship pre-
cisely those things which are not fitted to attract
the eye, which, when they do attract the eye, are
conspicuous by their want of beauty. These are
facts patent and undeniable, but they are none the
less suggestive, and they do not seem to me to
have received adequate attention. For, the point
to be considered is, that amidst this almost universal
canonisation of the universe there is one object
which the primitive man does not canonise—his
own soul. He canonises the Souls of others; he
worships the spirits of his ancestors; but it never
occurs to him to bow his head in reverence to that
mysterious life which dwells within his own breast.
Why is this 2 The life within him is the nearest
object to him in all the universe, the only object
in all the universe of which he has any real know-
ledge. One would naturally have expected that
with the dawn of the tendency to worship, the
earliest object of his adoration would have been
precisely that mysterious life which manifested it-
self in contact with all other things, and without
whose contact no other thing could be perceived.
Why is it that the primitive man turns away from
that which is nearest to him and bestows the gift
of divinity Originally upon those objects which are:
Seemingly the most alien to his own nature—upon
4 Messages of the Old Religions.
a petty piece of timber which his foot has accident-
ally struck, or a miserable bit of rag which has been
lifted by the passing wind 7
Now I believe it is possible to arrive at a solution
of this question. If we want to know why the
primitive man deifies everything but his own in-
dividual soul, we have only to ask whether he can
discover in his own individual soul any imperfection
which he cannot find in the objects around him.
Is there any respect in which the things of sur-
rounding nature seem to have an advantage over
this individual life which beats within him 2 There
is, I think, one. When the primitive man looks
within himself, he becomes conscious of something
of which he is not conscious when he looks at any
thing outside of him ; he becomes aware of a limit
to existence. In casting back his individual memory
he is almost immediately arrested by a blank. He
can retrace his steps some forty, fifty, or sixty years,
and then he is stopped by a stone wall. There is
a point beyond which he cannot go and at the
back of which there is oblivion. In the recognition
of that point and the oblivion beyond it the prim-
itive man arrives for the first time at the definite
conception of a beginning. He feels that there was
a time when he was not, and that the existence of
which he is now conscious has had a distinct origin.
There must have been something to cause that ori-
gin. Two facts lie before him—the fact that he
Introduction. 5
.--
is now an individual being, and the fact that a few
years ago he was individually nothing. Even to
his primitive consciousness it is already clear that
two such contrary states cannot have followed one
another without the intervention of a third agency.
If yesterday he was nothing and if to-day he is
something, there must have intervened some mediat-
ing power to effect the transformation from the one
state into the other. It is in the felt necessity for
such a mediating power that the primitive man
awakons for the first time to the conception of a
cause in the universe.
It will be seen that the view I have here taken
is essentially different from the view taken by
Paley. Paley, as is well known, regards the prim-
itive man as arriving at his notion of a universal
cause by an observation of the objects of nature.
He tells us that, if a savage found a watch, his im-
mediate conclusion would be that there must have
been a watchmaker. He intends to teach by an-
alogy that, when the primitive man first beheld the
mechanism of the universe, he would come at once
to the inference that it must have had a creator.
Now, of course we all understand that whenever an
object is beheld as a piece of mechanism, it must
at the same moment be beheld as requiring a maker.
But the question is, Would either the watch or the
universe or any part of the universe suggest to the
primitive man the conception of a piece of mechan-
6. Messages of the Old Religions.
ism 2 I believe that it would not. I believe that
the primitive man would look upon all objects in
movement in the same manner as a child looks
upon all objects in movement. A child's delight
in looking at a steam-boat lies precisely in the fact
that to the child the steamboat is not a piece of
mechanism, but an independent and self-acting
agent, moved by its own power and impelled by its
own will. A man has no such joy in the percep-
tion, just because a man has arrived at the notion
that the appearance of Self-agency is a delusion.
The primitive man's first sight of nature is a sight
which awakens wonder; but why does it awaken
wonder ? It is precisely because he seems to find
in the universe Something which he has found to
be lacking in himself—i.e., a principle of self-origina-
tion. He has arrived already at the conviction that
he himself is not independent. He has reached
that conviction by the blank in his own memory.
He has found that his individual life has come
into existence at a very recent date, and that there-
fore it must be dependent for its being on the ex-
istence of some other thing. What is that other
thing? Where shall he seek it ! Where can he
seek it more naturally than in the objects which
strike his eye 2 These objects arrest him in the
first instance just by their seeming contrast to him-
self. He has arrived at the conviction that he is
a poor, passive thing, that yesterday he was nothing,
Introduction. 7
and that he owes the breath of to-day to the in-
tervention of some other agency. When he opens
his eyes upon the universe he sees in it a collec-
tion of objects which appear to be more privileged
than himself. They do not suggest to him the
notion of a beginning. They seem to stand out in
contrast to his own limited existence. He finds
that they have been already on the field before his
coming and independently of his coming. Is it not
natural that, instead of seeking an origin for them,
he should sock in them an origin for himself 2 Is
it not to be expected that, instead of saying “who
made these ?” he should begin by saying “ have not
these made me'? He has come to the universe
not in search of a cause for the universe, but in
search of a cause for the only limit he has hitherto
found in nature—the limit to his own existence:
is it not to be presumed that his earliest pursuit
of such a cause will be amidst those objects of
the material world which are not subject to the
limits of his human consciousness 2
I do not think, however, we are entitled to sup-
pose that the primitive man will find in every object
of the universe an equally probable source of his
own origin. There is a fact to be accounted for
in the history of religions—the fact that the earliest
objects of worship are precisely those things which
are not in themselves the grandest. We should
have expected that the primitive man would have
8 Messages of the Old Religions.
fixed his first reverence on the most exalted things.
We should have thought that he would have looked
up to the sun and moon and stars and yielded to
them his earliest tribute of praise. On the contrary,
his gaze is riveted to that which is not above his
head but beneath his feet. Instead of looking up
to the heavens he casts his eye downward upon the
earth. He takes up the pebble from the beach,
or the stone from the causeway, or the piece of
cloth that has been wafted to his feet by the passing
breeze, and he invests each or all of them with a -
magical power. Why is this It is clearly an
act performed in the full exercise of choice. It
is not as if his senses had been originally defective
and incapable of taking in distant objects. His
perception of the heavenly bodies is as distinct
and lucid as is his perception of the pebble or the
piece of cloth. In Selecting the one in preference
to the other he is determined by some principle of
judgment. What is that principle of judgment 2
Would we not expect that the sun and moon would
present by their very activity more likeness to his
own spiritual nature than would be seen in the
sluggish inertness of the stone 7 Why, then, does
he pass the former by and concentrate upon the
latter his whole attention and his earliest reverence 2
Now I take the reason to lie precisely in the
fact that seems to constitute the ground for an
opposite conclusion. I believe that the primitive
J.ntroduction. 9
man prefers the stone to the star just because he
finds in the stone less likeness to himself than in
the star. Temember the conclusion which he has
reached with reference to his own spiritual nature.
He has found it to be a poor, perishable thing, a
thing which yesterday had no existence and which
is dependent for its present life upon the agency
of some other power. He comes to the sight of
nature with a prejudice against himself. If he seeks
in nature for a cause of himself, his hope to find
it shall certainly rest in those objects which seem
to him most foreign to his own being. What are
those objects which seem most foreign to his own
being 2 Clearly not the highest but the lowest
things of the universe. The higher objects of nature
exhibit to the eye the appearance of a continual
change. The glory which the heavens declare is a
perpetually shifting glory. The Sun rises and sets,
and even during the time of its abiding it reveals
stages of fluctuating light. The stars which one
moment are bright are in the next obscured by
a passing cloud. In these appearances the primi-
tive man beholds simply a repetition of his own
image, and it is his own image which he wants to
avoid. He wants to find some object in nature
which shall not suggest the idea of a beginning.
The higher objects of nature do suggest such an
idea. They seem to rise and fall with circum-
stances. They convey to his mind the same sense
10 Messages of the Old Religions.
of limitation which he has experienced in contem-
plating his own life. Where shall he meet with
an opposite suggestion ? Clearly he must seek it
in the things of the lower sphere. When he turns
from the star to the stone he seems to find all
that he is in search of. Here is an object which,
so far as he can observe, exhibits no fluctuation and
is subject to no structural change. It does not rise
or fall in its apparent magnitude ; it does not vary
in its intensity with the circling of the hours. It
suggests to the mind of the beholder no beginning,
no origination, no need of an outward cause. Its
very inertness, its very passiveness, its very im-
perviousness to surrounding impressions, invest it
with a semblance of eternity. Upon this, therefore,
the eye of the primitive man fastens. It seems to
him that he has found here the object best suited
to meet and to explain his own sense of depen-
dence. In the shifting feelings of his individual
life he has reached the conclusion that his own
being is short-lived. Here is an object which ex-
hibits no shifting, which to all appearance is the
same yesterday, to-day, and for ever. Is not this
the eternal something which lies at the base of
the other fleeting things 2 Is not this changeless
substance the power on which depends the human
spirits that are born and die, and the physical
stars which rise and set 2 May he not rest here
in his search for causes, and recognise in this
Introduction. 11
abiding object the origin and the source of all
things 2 -
This I believe to be the explanation of the un-
doubted fact that the earliest manifestation of wor-
ship is what is called Fetichism—the worship of the
lowest things. It is not denied that the primitive
man seeks his first object of adoration not in the
stars of heaven but in the fragments of wood and
stone which he picks up from the earth. But in the
view which I here have taken, I have departed
essentially from the reason commonly assigned to
this phenomenon. It is popularly said that the
primitive man reverences the lower in preference
to the higher objects because his own nature is as
yet too lowly to be aspiring. He is supposed to
be seeking things on a level with himself. To my
mind, on the other hand, it is exactly the reverse.
I believe that the primitive man in preferring the
stone to the star is actuated by precisely the opposite
desire. Instead of being attracted to the stone by
its levelness with his own nature, he is drawn to it
by its appearance of superiority to his own nature.
He sees in it something which presents the aspect
of a being above his own. He finds in his individ-
ual life the evidence of fluctuation and change; he
finds in this inert piece of matter the evidence of
steadfastness and immutability. Its very inertness
marks it out to his mind not only from the world
within but from the higher portion of the world
I 2 Messages of the Old Religions.
without. Accordingly he gives it the pre-eminence.
But in giving it the pre-eminence he is manifest-
ing not the absence but the presence of aspiration.
He comes to it not because his level is low, but
because he is in search of a standard higher than
himself, and one that shall be free from those limi-
tations which he has found in his in most nature.
He has been taught to reverence above all things
the attribute of longevity, eternity, everlastingness.
He has been taught to reverence that attribute just
because he has found it wanting in himself. He
believes it to be wanting in himself by reason of
the changes and fluctuations in his own thoughts
and feelings. This belief is a delusion, but it is
none the less present and strong. He flies for
refuge to the things which seem free from change
and not subject to fluctuation. He finds them not
in the highest but in the lowliest forms, and he
makes these forms his gods. He is unaware as yet
that they owe the aspect of changelessness not to
their perfection but to their imperfection, not to
the presence of power but to the absence of life.
His worship is based upon an erroneous premiss;
yet it is the expression of an instinct that is true
and real. The man has reached the knowledge of
his individual nothingness, and he has made an
honest attempt to pay some tribute to the Source
of his being. -
I would not have it thought, however, that in
Introduction. 13
this attitude of the Fetich - worshipper we have
reached any real recognition of the nature of reli-
gion. We have arrived at the origin of religion,
but not at religion itself. Man has come to the
knowledge of his own absolute dependence; but
religion can only begin where absolute dependence
ceases. The Sense of individual nothingness has
led him to the recognition of an outward cause;
but what is to lead him into communion with that
cause 2 Clearly it must be something above and
beyond the feeling of absolute dependence, must in
some sense be a counteraction of that feeling. Reli-
gion is not merely a getting; in its deepest essence
it is a giving. It begins with the sense that it
derives everything from another, but it must cul-
minate in the persuasion that it has Something to
give back. It has its root in the feeling of depen-
dence on the divine; it must reach its flower in the
desire to rise to the divine. Before it can reach
that flower the thing which has been first sown
must die; the Sense of absolute dependence must
be broken. The primitive man can attain the
knowledge of a first cause by the realising of his
own nothingness, but he can only commune with
that cause by arriving at the sense of liberty,
Communion is a giving, and he who gives must feel
himself to be free. The stage of passiveness must
be superseded before religion can begin.
Now the defect of the Fetich-worshipper is his
14 Messages of the Old Religions.
state of passiveness. His sense of dependence is too
absolute; before he can rise it must be broken. I
am aware that I am here in direct contradiction to
the popular view. The popular view regards the
primitive man as having fallen into error by select-
ing an object of worship from things too far beneath
him to be reverenced. Paradoxical as it may seem,
I hold the error to lie in the opposite extreme. The
object of worship selected by the primitive man is,
to my mind, too far above him. The piece of wood
or rag or stone to which he bows is a detrimental
object of reverence precisely from the fact that it is
reverenced by reason of its transcendentalism. He
has chosen it because it is unlike himself, because
it is removed from everything which his experience
has ever realised. He recognises it as divine because
it seems to be free from what he regards as the
limits of the human spirit, because it reveals no
spontaneity, no inward movement, no structural
change. His earliest worship is directed to that
which is most remote from his own humanity; his
reverence for the divine is dictated by his repudia-
tion of the human.
|How, them, is this dream to be broken 2 How is
the primitive man to be brought to the recognition
of the truly religious life 2 There are two possible
ways in which the delusion might be dispelled—
either by the depression of the Fetich, or by the
elevation of the spirit. If the Fetich-worshipper
Introduction. 15
were permitted for a sufficiently long time to ex-
amine the object of his reverence, he would cer-
tainly come to see that it did not possess that
attribute of changelessness in which he has clothed
it. He would come to see that the pebble on the
beach is as certain to be worn away as is the life
of the individual soul. But it so happens that the
Fetich-worshipper cannot get a sufficiently long time
to make any such observation. The pebble on the
beach will survive him, and, in spite of its constant
diminution, it will during his earthly life never
seem to get less. There is no hope, therefore, of
breaking the illusion through the depression of the
Fetich. But there is another and a higher method.
What if, instead of depressing the Fetich, it were
possible to raise the spirit 2 What if the primitive
man could be brought to change his first conclusion ?
What if he should be led to altor his mind as to
his own nothingness He has fled to the Fetich
as a refuge from that fleetingness and short-lived-
ness which he has found within himself. What if
he should find that after all he is not fleeting,
not short-lived ? He has arrived at his first notion
by the discovery that his individual life had a
beginning in the past ; what if he should come to
the discovery that a beginning in the past does not
involve an end in the future ? Would not the
effect of such a revelation be to lift the spirit of
the man out of its sense of dependence into a sense
| 6 Messages of the Old Religions.
of exaltation, and to clothe with the attribute of
divinity that which in days of yore had been the
symbol of creature-life 2
Now this is exactly what happens in the history
of religion. The stage of Fetich-worship is broken
not by the depression of the Fetich but by the eleva-
tion of the spirit, and the spirit is elevated by losing
the sense of its own short-livedness. It loses its
Sense of short-livedness by reaching the conclusion
that a beginning in the past does not involve an
end in the future—in other words, by arriving at
the conception of immortality. As long as the
primitive man believes himself to be mortal, he
worships the pebble and the rag. As long as he
associates changefulness with death, he deifies that
which appears to have no change. But if he should
cease to associate changefulness with death, if he
should come to believe that an object may be per-
manent which has yet a life free from monotony,
the effect must inevitably be to withdraw his ad-
miration from the things which he first worshipped,
and to concentrate his thoughts upon a new and
an opposite ideal.
The question, then, is, how is the primitive man
to be brought to the belief that changefulness needs
not be associated with fleetingness—in other words,
how is he to arrive at the notion that the spirit
of man, though it has a beginning in the past, may
be without end in the future ? Remember that the
&
Introduction. • * ~ * 17
primitive man does not need to reach the idea of
immortality; he has already reached that idea. Not
only has he reached it, it has been the master-light
of all his seeing. It would not be too much to
say that it is the idea of immortality which has
made the primitive man a Fetich-worshipper. We
have seen in our previous analysis how he was
first led to the search for a cause in nature by the
recognition of his own individual nothingness. We
have seen why he began by adoring the lowest and
not the highest objects of the universe. We have
seen that he invested with divinity the pebble in
preference to the star, just because he fancied that
he found in the pebble a greater permanence than
in the star. But what does all this amount to ?
To nothing less than a search for immortality, a
search for some principle in nature which shall
prove an abiding principle. The idea of immor-
tality, so far from being a superstructure in the
religious temple, is itself the foundation-stone of
that temple ; it lies at the base of all worship
and constitutes the condition of all faith. The
idea of immortality is not only at the base of all
religion ; it is at the foundation of the human
intellect itself. How has the Fetich - worshipper
come to the conception of a cause 2 It is just by
arriving at the notion that his own individual life
has been too short-lived in the past to be itself
a cause. He has been from the beginning impelled
H
T 8 Messages of the Old Religions.
by the very sense of his nothingness to seek before
all other things for an object in the universe which
shall suggest abiding permanence, and he has come
to the idea of causation because his earliest con-
sciousness has been the conviction that the fleeting
life of man depends on a life that is not fleeting.
It is not, then, the idea of immortality which
the primitive man requires to reach. His error as a
Fetich-worshipper does not lie in the absence of that
idea. He has all along recognised the necessity for
an immortal principle in nature; the mistake he
has committed has been in finding that immortal
principle in the wrong place. He has not sought
it in the soul, but in the pebble, in the wood, in the
rag. The transition which he has to pass through
must be a transition not into the idea of immortality
but into the sphere of immortality. He must learn
to see in the soul what he has only seen in the
pebble, the wood, the rag. He must lose his fear
of the changeful. He must cease to believe that
variety of experience is incompatible with continu-
ance of existence. He must be brought to the
conviction that the human spirit, with all the shift-
ings of its scenery, may be itself the most per-
manent thing in the universe, and that the changes
in the life of man may themselves be prompted by
the movement of a life which is the same yesterday,
to-day, and for ever. - - -
Płow is the primitive man to be brought to such
Introduction. 19
a conviction —or rather, how has he been brought
to it? The transition from the immortality of the
Fetich to the immortality of the human soul became
very soon an accomplished fact : if we find the
first generation worshipping the piece of wood or
stone, we find the second worshipping the spirits of
their ancestors. What is it that has effected this
transition ? What is that experience in human life
which has caused human life itself to assume an
exalted position in the eyes of those who yesterday
looked upon it as a debased and worthless thing 2
Mr Spencer would explain it by the phenomena
of dreams; I think it would be more correct to
say that it was produced by reflection on the
waking out of dreams. It is quite true that to the
primitive man the dead come back in the visions
of the night, and, if none but the dead came back,
it would be easy to see how he should mistake the
visions for realities. But to the primitive man
everything returns in sleep as well as the dead.
The memory of the dead is not an isolated pheno-
menon of the hours of night; the whole past day
comes back with all that ever was in it—its lights
and its shadows, its suns and its systems, its men
and ifs women. There is no account taken of the
difference between the things which still exist and
the things which in the interval have passed away;
it is a universal memory. And this universality
must even to the primitive mind deprive the memory
20 Messages of the Old Religions.
of the dead of all significance. How can it have
significance when it is only one phase of a vast
landscape which has all equally and in every detail
been reproduced by the hand of sleep? I cannot,
therefore, accept the view that the memory of the
dead in dreams had any large share in awakening
the primitive mind to a sense or a hope of its own
immortality. But I think that the phenomena of
dreams do, from a totally different direction, suggest
a solution of this difficult problem. It is not in
the sphere of dreaming itself that I would look for
an explanation, but in that other and more inter-
esting phenomenon—the awakening out of dreams.
When the primitive man reaches the stage of reflec-
tion, is not the study of this fact of all others best
suited to raise him into the hope of his individual
immortality ? For, what is the fact that is here
contemplated ? It is the sensation of a continuous
life which has preserved its continuity through a
change of consciousness. I do not think that any
other experience in the world is so fitted to convey
to the primitive mind this impression—not even
the experience of the awakening out of dreamless
sleep. The awakening out of sleep, would in itself
suggest only a repetition of the first miracle, a
repetition of that process by which the individual
life was originally lifted out of nothingness. It
could have no other effect than to impress the
untutored mind with an additional and reiterated
Introduction. 21
sense of its own impotence. But the transition
from dreamland into waking consciousness is a very
different thing. Here, the mind is itself an agent,
an actor in its own changes. It is quite conscious
that it has passed from one world into another world,
and that in the course of that passage it has kept
its continuity. It has been recipient of experiences
not only varied but contrary, yet through all the
contrariety it has remained the same. It has made
a transition from one stage of existence into another
and an entirely different stage of existence, and
between them it can find no thread of connection.
But it has awakened to the fact that it is itself
the thread of connection. It has come to the con-
sciousness that it has an identity quite independent
of circumstances and quite irrespective of similar
experiences. It has been taught the new and the
desiderated truth that the individual life of man
may keep an unbroken continuity amid the constant
breaking of every outward association and amid the
perpetual shifting of all extraneous things. --
Now, when the primitive man arrives at this
thought, he arrives at a new revelation. He learns
for the first time to associate the idea of immor-
tality with the life of an individual soul. IIillierlo
he has associated that idea only with things from
which individuality is absent. He has given the
palm for longevity to those objects of nature which
display the greatest monotony, and therefore mani-
22 Messages of the Old Religions.
fest the least individual power. But when there
breaks upon him the reflection of what an individual
soul really is, there comes inevitably a transference
of his ideal. When he finds that the human spirit
within him is capable of living in two totally dif.
ferent worlds and yet remaining the same, when
he discovers that the life which he believed to be so
fleeting is able to subsist in the midst of a transition
the most complete and the most radical, the effect
will assuredly be to invest that life in his imagina-
tion with the attribute of immortality. His human
spirit will cease to be a poor contemptible thing
by reason of its shifting scenery; that which was
once its weakness shall be deemed its glory. The
test of immortality shall be no longer the power of
an object to remain unchanged: it will be the
power of an object to abide in the presence of
changes; and his own individual life, which has
first manifested that power, shall receive his first
association with the thought of everlasting being.
You will observe that when the primitive man
has reached this stage he is no longer primitive.
The detection of what is involved in the transi-
tion from dreamland into waking consciousness
demands already that the man should have arrived
at a period of reflection. Accordingly, I would
place the recognition of the soul's immortality in
the second and not in the first stage of the history
of religion. As far back as the eye can reach, we
Introduction. - 23
are confronted by the spectacle of two forms of
faith dwelling seemingly side by side—the worship
of the inanimate Fetich, and the worship of departed
souls. Yet, though seemingly side by side, it does
not follow that they are really so. For, just as
in the world of space things which in reality are
far apart seem in the distance to be grouped close
together, so, in the world of time, systems which
appear to be contemporaneous forms of thought.
may be actually separated by many generations.
The Felich - worshipper and the worshipper of de-
parted spirits cannot have had their origin in the
same hour of the day. Both are in search of an
immortal principle, yet they seek it by different
roads and by roads which indicate a different plane
of development. The Fetich-worshipper seeks the
immortal principle amongst the things which are
changeless and monotonous; the worshipper of
departed spirits looks for it amidst the varied
manifestations of life. . The former is certainly the
earlier, because it is the lower and inferior form.
The latter could never have begun to be until the
man began; to think. Before he could reverence the
spirits of the dead, he must begin to reverence.
the spirits of the living, must begin specially to
reverence the only spirit which he directly knows—
his own individual life. Why is it that he comes
to invest the dead with a consciousness and a
personality outside of the present world ! It is.
24. Messages of the Old Religions.
because he himself has already become conscious
of having lived in two worlds—the world called
dreamland and the world called waking. When he
becomes conscious of that fact in himself he transfers
it to those around him, transfers it especially to the
spirits of the departed. He says, “If two worlds
are mine, may two worlds not also be theirs? If
I have been able to keep my continuity through
a transition so marked and so complete as that from
dreamland into waking, may not those whom I
call the dead have also preserved their continuity
in a transition from the things of earth to the
things beyond the earth.” And when he has made
this reflection the man changes the object of his
reverence; he transfers it from the Fetich to the
soul. He turns from the worship of bare matter to
the worship of pure spirit. He had begun by rever-
encing nothing but the form ; his tendency now
is to reverence the spirit without the form. The
souls of his ancestors are not originally conceived as
clothed in an earthly garment. He thinks of them
as shadowy, impalpable presences, for the most part
invisible and inaudible, manifesting themselves
through imperceptible avenues and influencing the
mind by subtle agencies. The man in his first
moment of reflection revolts entirely from the ideal
of his primitive days. It would almost seem as
if he designed to compensate the human soul for
the dishonour he had done her. In his primitive.
Introduction. 25
age he had denied the divinity of spirit because he
had found it subject to change; in his reflective
age he denies the divinity of matter because he
finds it unable to keep up with the changes of
the spirit.
Have we now reached the completed idea of
religion ? No; there is one stage remaining to
render it perfect. Hitherto the mind of man has
vibrated between two extremes. The Fetich-wor-
shipper has reverenced the body where it has least
life; the worshipper of departed spirits has rever-
enced the life where it has least body. There is
wanted something which shall unite the extremes.
The reflective mind has revolted from the tendency
of the primitive mind, but it has revolted too far.
In its recoil from the inanimate wood and stone, it
has deserted too much the clothing of the temporal
form. The spirits of the departed before whom it
bows are too ethereal, too shadowy. They are
in want of flesh and blood to take away their
vagueness; they wait for some earthly covering
to invest them with the attributes of the human.
Accordingly, there is wanted a principle of religion
whereby that which has been unclothed shall be
clothed upon. The bodily element is dead without
the spirit, but the spirit is equally dead without
the body. The stage of completed religion -must
be one in which there is recognised a union between
body and soul, one in which the Fetich is lifted out
26 Messages of the Old Religions.
of its meanness by being filled with the spirit of
life, and in which the spirit of life is emancipated
from its vagueness by being incorporated in the
form of the fetich.
The whole subsequent history of religion is an
accomplishment of this process — a narration of
those steps by which the spiritual life finds in-
creasingly its embodiment in outward things. Per-
haps the first stage is the Spiritualising of the
Fetichtitself. The man takes the piece of wood and
the piece of stone and carves them into a human
image. When he has done this we give him for
the first time the name of idolater. And yet,
nothing is more certain than that we have used
the name in the wrong place and time. If it.
was applicable at all, it was to the earlier period.
Tt is when the man reverences the unconscious
Fetich believing it to be unconscious, that we ought
really to call him an idolater. When he comes to
form the Fetich into a likeness of himself, when
he begins to carve the wood and stone into the
image of the human, he has already in the deepest
sense ceased to be an idolater. He is no more
an idolater than the little girl is an idolater when
she dresses and speaks to her doll; in fact the two
cases are almost identical. The little girl speaks
to her doll not as a doll but as something more.
If she realised the fact that it was a doll, she
could not speak to it. It is because she invests.
Introduction. 27
it with her own girlhood, with her own prospective
womanhood, that she is alone able to make it an
object of communion. So is it with the childhood
of man. He begins to dress in his own likeness the
forms which he sees around him, and then he
proceeds to commune with the image he has made.
But it is essential to the very existence of such
an intercourse that he should have ceased to view
these forms merely as what they are. It is essential
that he should see them transfigured into his own
likeness, lit up by his own intelligence, permeated
by his own spirit. It is essential that he should
think of them as responsive and capable of re-
sponding to the aspirations of his human heart
through the possession of a kindred nature and the
sharing of a common life.
I do not think, however, that the childhood of
the human race can long continue to rest in the
adoration of these lower forms. It seems to me that,
when man has once arrived at the notion of the
glorification of spirit, he will naturally be most
attracted to those objects which require least trans-
figuration. We have seen how in the earliest age
he was drawn to the lower rather than to the higher
objects of nature from the fact that he found the
latter too like himself. That fact will now have the
exactly opposite tendency; it will attract instead
of repelling. He has come to find that the cap-
acity for change is not a mark of perishableness
28 Messages of the Old Religions. .
but of permanence. Accordingly, the things which
he once avoided on account of their changeful-
ness shall be precisely the things which he shall
now most earnestly seek. The higher regions of
nature shall be to him a more congenial sphere of
worship than the monotonous materials from which
he selected his Fetiches. He will go with most
alacrity to the things most like himself, the things
most allied to the movements of life. He will go to
the sea, to the winds, to the rivers, to the stars, to
everything that exhibits motion and indicates con-
tinuance in change. His new Pantheon will be
filled by the gods of the upper air, because in the
gods of the upper air he shall find the objects
nearest to his own being. He shall interpret their
movements after the analogy of Spirit, shall clothe
them in the attributes of his human life, and shall
reverence in them the vision of that profound
mystery which he himself has found to be living
within him. , "
It is a very barren subject of inquiry to ask
whether at this stage of his religious history the
man shall worship many gods or one. If I brought
a company of children into a large room in which I
had previously placed a variety of toys, what would
be the effect of this variety Would the children
be attracted simultaneously to all, or would they
fix their minds upon one and the same Clearly,
they would follow neither of these alternatives
Introduction. 29
They would neither be united in the admiration of
the whole, nor would they be agreed in recognising
the superior excellence of any single object; but
each would fix his attention upon that particular
thing which best suited his own ideal. One might
be drawn to the image of a wooden horse, another
to the imitation of a ship, a third to the similitude
of a steam-engine. But the point for us to observe
is that, whatever the object might be on which the
attention of each child should be fastened, this
object to that child would become, for the time,
supreme. Whether it were horse or ship or steam-
engine that first attracted its admiration, the object
of attraction would, for the instant, be the only
object in its universe. It would hold sway to the
exclusion of all others. The period of its reign
might be short-lived; it might last a few hours or
it might expire in a few minutes; but during the
time of its continuance it would rule alone and
unrivalled. Every other form would vanish from
the sphere of the child's observation. When it
entered the room it would find many objects; but,
the moment it had made its choice, it would see only
one. It would regard the possessions of the other
children with a species of contempt, and the other
children themselves with a certain amount of pity.
It would say of its own new-found idol, “There is
none among the gods like unto thee.”
Now all this is highly pertinent to the present
$30 Messages of the Old Religions,
question. The children of the human race are
exactly in the position of my hypothetical child.
They are brought into a large room which has
been already stored with a multitude of attractive
things. These things are not equally attractive to
all. Each child gravitates towards a different object
*—one to the Sun, one to the moon, one to the stars,
ſome to the rivers or winds or seas. But whatever
the object of choice may be, it is, while it lasts,
supreme. He who worships the winds worships
them exclusively, sees in them the arbiters of all
other things. It is another question altogether, how
long that worship will last; the childhood of the
race cannot, any more than the childhood of the
individual, retain for a lengthened period one object
in its admiration. To-morrow in all probability
its allegiance will be transferred from the winds
to the sun or to the river. The One point for us to
observe is that during the time of its allegiance it
recognises no other form but that which has first
attracted it, admits into its worship no other object
of adoration than that before which it has already
bowed.
This is not Polytheism and it is not Monotheism ;
it is what Max Müller calls Henotheism,” It
cannot be said to be either the recognition of many
gods or the recognition of one; it is the recognition
* Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as illustrated
by the Religions of India, p. 285,
Introduction. - 31
of one god at a time. The child-world does with
the objects of its religion what the child-life does
with the objects of its play—selects that which
suits it best, and keeps it until it is tired of it.
Ili this religious stage, therefore, there is an element
both of Polytheism and of Monotheism which is
yet different from either. I do not indeed think
it possible that Polytheism as an actual experience
ever existed. I do not believe that the human
mind at any stage of its being is really capable
of fixing its attention on more than one thing at
a time. I say really; apparently it is the reverse.
The transitions of human thought are so rapid, and
the combinations of human thought are so multiform,
that one is apt to be deceived. It often seems as
if the mind were contemplating two objects at
once, when in reality it is fixed upon a single object.
It is quite possible, for instance, to have in view
at one moment the different parts of a house. Yet
in this case the object of contemplation is really
one; the house constitutes a single image, and all
its different parts are comprehended at a glance as
things which make up this image. So is it, I
believe, with the systems called Polytheism. There
have been times when men have seemed to bow
down before a multitude of gods, and to recognise
the Sovereignty of many heavenly rulers. Yet,
closely looked at, the rule of the many will be
found to melt into the government of the one
32 Messages of the Old Religions.
This- so-called polytheism is in reality the recogni-
tion of one vast building—a house not made with
hands, eternal in the heavens. The apparent diver-
sity in the objects of worship is really nothing
more than the diversity subsisting between the
different parts of an earthly dwelling. Looked at
-singly, each part has a function of its own, and
each part may be described in distinction from
the others. But, viewed in connection with the
whole, there is no plurality; there is in truth
one structure and only one, and all the varieties
in the formation of the separate angles are lost
and overshadowed in the unity of the completed
building. - -
I lold, then, that as a matter of fact Polytheism
is impossible; that there never really existed or
could exist a time in which the mind of man had
its attention simultaneously fixed upon two objects
of worship. The nearest approach to the worship of
more gods than one is the stage called Hemotheism,
in which there is indeed recognised a plurality of
heavenly objects, but in which the place of honour
is occupied by each in turn. Even here; there is
no real plurality. Each ruler may have a short
reign, but, while it lasts, his reign is absolute. The
attention of the worshipper is at no time fixed upon
more than one god, and is at all times dominated
by one. If now it be asked, What is that point
of transition in which the one object of worship
Introduction. - 33
becomes a permanent object 2 I answer, it will be
found at that stage in which the mind's attraction
passes from a sensuous admiration into a principle
of love. What is the difference between a child's
devotion to its toy and a man's devotion to his
friend; why is the one so much more short-lived
than the other ? The reason lies in the fact that
the bond of attraction is in each case fastened to
a different object. The child is attached to his
toy through a cord that communicates with the
eye; the man is attached to his friend through a
bond that communicates with the heart. The tran-
sition from the many gods to the one God will be
accomplished in that hour when a corresponding
transition has been made from the attraction of the
eye to the attraction of the mind. It is in my
opinion a great mistake to imagine that man's
sense of the divine unity was originally awakened
by his sense of natural law. I believe that it came
before the coming of science, before the knowledge
of nature, before the perception of law. I believe
that it was awakened not by the intellect but by
the heart, not by the sense of material fixedness,
but by the recógnition within the soul of a perma-
ment love. If the child's toy were adequate to the
child’s whole nature, the toy would hold over the
child a perpetual sceptre. The reason why to-
‘morrow it changes the object of to-day is the fact
that the object of to-day is only sufficient for the
C
34 Messages of the Old Religions.
day; to-morrow the child's nature will be bigger
and will need a larger toy. So is it in the world
of religious history. The childhood of the race will
have a new god each day as long as each god shall
only suffice for each day. But whenever the race
shall find an ideal whose attractiveness shall be
coextensive with all the instincts of humanity,
whenever it shall fix its heart upon a form whose
beauty shall be unaffected by the changes in natu-
ral beauty, it shall at that moment enter into the
recognition of an object of worship which shall not *
only be supreme but permanent in its duration.
It is, then, a barren question to inquire at what
time the race of man passed from the recognition
of the many gods into the recognition of the one.
There was, I believe, no such time, no settled date at
which the collective human species made a simulta-
Ineous transition from Henotheism into Monotheism.
‘It depended entirely upon the progress of the in-
dividual mind. Those men who had received from
their object of worship the deepest satisfaction of
their nature would keep their object longest; those
who had received from it the satisfaction of all
their nature would keep their object always. In
•one community there might exist side by side the
representatives both of the old faith and of the new
-—some who were still each day exchanging one
image for another, and some who had fixed their
thearts upon a foundation that could not be moved.
Introduction, 35
But while it is useless to seek a precise stage in
history when the worship of the many passed into
the worship of the one, there is a search for unity
which is far more legitimate and far more satis-
factory. Instead of trying to determine at what
time the many gods were combined into the single
Deity, it would be of infinitely more purpose to
determine what made it possible at any time for
such a combination to take place, Is it not trans-
parent on the very surface that, if the many have
become the one, it can only be because there is
already within the many a principle of unity.
When two are made one it is because the two are
already harmonious: a true marriage has its begin-
ning not in the tying of the nuptial cord, but in
that unity of life which has existed implicitly in
the lives of the separate individuals. Even so is
it in the religions of the world. If to every race
there has come a time when the worship of one
God has supplanted the worship of many deities,
it can only be because in the worship of these many
deities there has existed from the beginning one
common element, one underlying principle which
has made them already a unity. The marriage is
not the cause but the effect of their union, the last
result and the outward expression of what has
been all along latent within. What is this prin-
ciple of union that exists already in the diversities
of worship ! It is a far more important question
*36 Messages of the Old Religions.
than the historical question of when Monotheism
began to be. If Monotheism ever began to be, it
was only by reason of a preceding and a pre-
existent unity. Nay, if ever the time shall come
when all men shall worship together one God, one
faith, one baptism, it shall only be because in their
separate faiths and in their separate baptisms there
has been a connecting bond which has ensured their
ultimate union. . What is this bond; what is that
common element which underlies religious diversity
and makes it possible for religious diversity to pass
away ? The consideration of this subject demands
a separate chapter.
The Common Element in Religions. 37,
CHAPTER II.
THE COMMON ELEMENT IN RELIGIONS.
THERE are few spectacles which have habitually
appeared more Sad than the variety of forms assumed
by religious worship. To the eye of every missionary
the number and the variations of human creeds have
always seemed amongst the things most to be de-
plored in the world. The question is, Why? No
man will say that the sight of variety is in itself
more Sad than the spectacle of monotony: every
one must feel that it is the reverse. No one regards
it as a blennish in the art of poetry that it embraces
within its pale so many different forms of poetic
thought. No One looks upon it as a blemish in
the art of painting that it holds within its sceptre
so many different ideals of the painter's power.
Why should it be thought a blemish in the aspect
of religion that it is found throughout the world
in ever-varied shapes and in ever-changing garbs 2
In every other department of study the existence
of variety is reckoned a triumph. Why should the
38 Messages of the Old Religions.
sphere of religion be the only exception ? Why
should the multiplicity of religious beliefs and the
diversity of religious schools be viewed by earnest
minds as indications of the depravity of human
nature and as signs of incipient development in the
life of the soul ?
Now I think it will be found that the reason of
this difference lies in something deeper–lies, indeed,
in the fact that religion is not habitually regarded
either as a Science or as an art. The scientific man
seeks the presence of law beneath every form; the
poetic man seeks the presence of beauty beneath
every form; but the religious man tends originally
to recognise only one form. Every nation looks
upon its own mode of belief as an accidental privi-
lege—something which has fallen from heaven as
a special gift to itself. Accordingly, it feels con-
strained from the very outset to magnify that
element in its faith which most separates it from
other faiths. It not only glorifies the form—which
is legitimate—but it feels bound to disparage every
other form. It has received its own religion not
by a law of human nature, but by a miracle which
has set the law of human nature at defiance. It
has been elevated above the worship of other lands
as far as heaven is distant from the earth. The
worship of other lands is therefore to it only a
falsehood and a blasphemy. The variety in the
religious opinions around it is a source of inex-
The Common Element in Religions. 39
pressible sadness. Every divergence from its own
form of faith is a divergence from the path of holi-
less. Its missionary zeal is prompted and inflamed
by the sense of this surrounding destitution. It
feels impelled to establish uniformity of worship,
and to make itself the pattern of this uniformity.
Yet even in its missionary efforts it does not hope
to reach the hearts of men through a human chan-
nel. Its own faith has come to it by miracle;
by miracle must it come to others also. The only
chance for the establishment of religious unity lies
through the suppression of humanity; for the human
is the antithesis of the divine, and God is only
reached by the annihilation of man. . . .
Now, if this view be the true one, religion is the
most unscientific, the most imartistic, the most in-
human thing in the world, and the longer the world
lasts, the more unscientific and the more inhuman
it must become. The tendency of all mental pro-
gress is to reduce phenomena under one law. Every
advance of thought has in other departments been
an advance in unity. If religion should elect to
linger behind, its position must ultimately be one
of absolute solitude. But is religion to linger be-
hind 2 For some time back there have boon signg"
of the contrary. In nothing has our age been more
distinguished from previous ages than in the revolt
from this first conception of the nature of faith.
It is not in the loosening of its creeds and formulas:
40 Messages of the Old Religions.
that the nineteenth century is distinguished as a
Broad-Church century. Creeds and formulas have
been loosened before; the age of the Reformation
was more pronouncedly an age of religious licence
than ours. The peculiarity of the nineteenth cen-
tury lies in this, that the loosening of its creeds and
formulas is not a cause but an effect, not the inau-
guration of a movement but the result of a move-
ment already inaugurated. It is not a negative
but a positive tendency that has produced the
liberalism of the nineteenth century. The minds
of men have relaxed their interest in details only
because they have found an interest in the existence
of a general principle whose being was hitherto un-
suspected. They have awakened to the recognition
of the fact that in addition to religions there is a
religion. They have come to believe that beneath
the various forms there is something which is com-
mon, that, underlying the diversities of creed, there
is already existing an element of unity. If rever-
ence for the form has declined, it is only in order
that there may be more room. for the operation of
the spirit. The movement towards the recognition
of a common element in religion has been, strictly
speaking, a purely modern one. It found its initial
note in the latter half of last century. It was
inaugurated by Lessing in his “education of the
human race.” It was taken up by Herder in his
search for a common principle of universal evolu-
The Common Element in Religions. 41
tion. It was carried on by those systems of German
illuminism which during the first quarter of the
nineteenth century made the field of speculation
itself a region of romance. It was borne into our
own country by the very increase of those mechani-
cal appliances which are supposed to minister only
to the outer man. The increased facilities for travel
opened up lands which were before unknown, and
in proportion as they became known, the points of
difference between them and us were minimised.
The spirit of liberalism in England has been exactly
contemporaneous with her power of locomotion. It
is popularly said that travel liberalises. The saying
is true, but it is not true for the popularly given
reason. It is not because the man of travel is
brought into contact with many diversities that he
becomes enlarged in his sympathies. It is rather
because beneath these diversities he recognises for
the first time a common bond of unity. It is
because he wakens to the conviction that human
nature is very much the same under all circum-
stances, and that, underlying the differences of cus-
toms and modes of life, there beats within the heart
the same impulse and the same instinct. In short,
it is bcCauSc the man of travel arrives at a songo
of the world's essential smallness, amid its wide-
ness, that he ceases to believe in the exclusiveness
of his own privilege or in the monopoly of his own
creed.
42 Messages of the Old Religions.
Such has been the position of our country duling
the last half-century. It has obtained ever-in-
creasingly a door of entrance into other lands, and
the result has been to minimise its sense of their
religious differences. It has found beneath these
differences an underlying unity. Its search has
been stimulated into a new direction. It has ceased
to seek for the points of divergence between other
faiths and its own; it has begun to study the
points in which other faiths do not diverge from
its own. It is trying to find in the sphere of
religion what it has already found in every other
sphere — an element of contact between separate
forms. Just as it has discovered a principle of
unity between the anatomy of the higher and the
anatomy of the lower Organisms, so it essays to find
a principle of unity between the religion of the
developed and the religion of the undeveloped races.
If the effect of this tendency has been to abate the
ardour of missionary enterprise, it has also been
greatly to increase its facilities. The pioneers of a
religion, the men who seek to carry their own form
of faith into other lands, no longer need to depend
on the influx of a force purely supernatural. They
can henceforth be stimulated by the thought that in
the minds of those whom they wish to proselytise
there is already existing an element of concord with
their own. They can be fortified by the knowledge
that beneath all its diverse forms there is even now
The Common Element in Feligions. 43
in operation one common religion, and that the diver.
sities in the form are themselves only able to endure
by reason of that principle of unity which abides
ever the same.
What, then, is this principle of unity which un-
derlies the different forms of religion ? When we
look on the surface of the surrounding faiths it
almost seems as if there were no such bond. It
cannot be said that there is any single doctrine of
religion on which the worshippers of every creed
are agreed. Even those beliefs which to modern
development seem elementary have at no time com-
manded the simultaneous assent of the united world,
The belief in a personal God has occupied little
place in the religious philosophies of India. The
doctrine of individual immortality has had no share
in the development of Buddhism. The recognition
of a moral government in the universe has been a
comparatively late fact in the history of religion. If
even in its most elementary aspects the study of
human worship reveals little trace of unity, the
diversities which it displays must be still more
broadly marked when we pass from first principles
to secondary details. On the whole, it may be fairly
concluded, that wherever religious unity is to be
found, it cannot be found in the acceptance of a
common object of worship. It may be doubted if,
even within the pale of any one religion, there is
really recognised a common object of worship. We
44 Messages of the Old Religions.
do not make an object common by giving it a single
name. Millions of human beings are united in the
recognition of Jesus Christ as the highest ideal in
the universe; but it may be questioned if to any
two individuals amongst them the ideal is exactly
the same. The Christ of the middle ages is no
more like the Christ of modern times than the
Jupiter of ancient paganism is like the God of
scientific evolution. A universally-sided character
can never be universally seen in precisely the same
light. The Christian claims for Christ such a char-
acter, and as the result of that claim he must be
prepared to give up the hope of any unity which
shall be based upon the sight of one outward form.
Is there any other direction in which we can look
for religious unity ? If we cannot find it in a
common object of worship, is there any other region
in which we may hope to discover it ! There is;
let us turn from the object of worship to the atti-
tude of the worshipper, And to facilitate our
search in this direction, let us take an analogous
case, the case that of all others presents to my
mind the nearest analogy—the sphere of the poet.
No man will deny that there is in the world a thing
called poetry. No man would ever dream of believ-
ing that the various specimens of rhythmic thought
which meet the eye from all quarters constitute,
each of them, a separate subject of study. We
, all feel that the points of separation between them
The Common Element in Religions. 45
are nothing in comparison to the point in which
they are agreed. We feel, in short, that they are
pervaded by one and the same spirit—a spirit of
poetry. But if we ask what is this spirit of poetry,
if we ask where lies the point of union which
makes these separate verses the parts of a single
science, the answer is not at first very easy. If
we look, on the surface here, we shall have very
much the same experience which we had when
looking on the Surface of religion — a sense of
diversity everywhere. Here also it may be said
that the unity cannot lie in the subject-matter. It
cannot be held that there is any one subject on
which the attention of poets has been simultane-
ously concentrated. Every sphere of nature has
been ransacked in Search of materials for the poetic
mind. The mountain and the valley, the grand
and the commonplace, the strong and the gentle,
the grave and the gay, have at one and the same
moment been the theme of the sons of song. Nor
can it be said that Song itself has been the medium
of union. Poetry needs not be rhyme, needs not be
verse, needs not even be rhythm. Thomas Carlyle
is the most unrhythmical of writers, communicates
his thoughts in sentences that defy the possibility of
scansion; yet Thomas Carlyle is worthy of a place
amongst the greatest of the poets, worthy of a place
amongst that band of poets whose form of diction
lias been specially rhythmical — the prophets of
46 Messages of the Old Religions.
Israel. In all these respects the idea of finding a
point of union for poetic minds is shown to be
abortive. And yet it remains true that, in spite of
these variations of form, no one can fail to recognise
that there is a point of union. Every one feels
that there is a line of demarcation between poetry
and prose, and that this line of demarcation is
marked with equal distinctness whatever the form
or the subject of the writing may be. What is this
line of demarcation ? What is it that enables a
man instinctively and instantaneously to say of any
composition, “This is poetry,” “That is prose " ?
The feeling is patent to all; is it possible to trans-
late the feeling into the terms of science 2
I believe it is. I believe that it is possible to
define in logical terms that line of boundary which
separates the sphere of the poet from the sphere
of the prose-writer. I think it will be found that
the distinction between a poetic and a prosaic state-
ment lies essentially in one principle—incarnation,
The definition I would assign to poetry is the “in-
carnation of truth.” The poet gives to every thought
a body. He clothes one thing in the likeness of
another thing. His mission is to find the analogies
of nature. He is to the man of Science what John
the Baptist was to Christianity—a forerunner, a
pioneer. If it is the province of the man of
science to discover a common law, it is the pro-
vince of the poet to discover a common likeness.
The Common Element in Religions. 47
In every object of nature and in every thought of
mind he sees, or dreams that he sees, the similarity
to some other thing. He unclothes each form in
order that he may clothe it anew, in order that he
may behold it dressed in the similitude of some-
thing else. He gives to matter the garb of spirit,
and to spirit the form of matter. If he looks upon
the “gadding vine,” he sees in its gadding the grief
for Lycidas. If he beholds the dawning of the day,
he interprets it as the rosy hand of morn unbarring
the gates of light. If he hears a record of the
miracle of Cana in Galilee, he explains the trans-
formation after the analogy of life—
“The conscious water knew its Lord and blushed.”
Not only does the poet clothe one object in the
likeness of another; he clothes himself in the like-
ness of everything he depicts. Emerson says that
if you want to paint a tree, it is not enough to
describe the tree, you must be the tree. The poet
must be everything of which his theme discourses;
he must flow with the stream, bloom with the flower,
glitter with the sunbeam, whisper with the Zephyr,
sparkle with the fountain. It is, in short, in the
idea of incarnation that all poetry begins, continues,
and ends. There may be the widest differences in
subject, in form, in treatment, but in this one respect
there must be a common soul. That which separ-
ates everywhere and always the poetic from the
48 . Messages of the Old Religions.
prosaic mind is the power to say, “Let the word be
made flesh.” -
Now all this is not irrelevant; it has a strict
bearing upon the question on which we are en-
gaged. If there is any point where the secular
blends with the sacred, it is in the sphere of the
poet. Poetry and religion have always been re-
garded as the children of one family; whatever .
parentage be assigned to the one must be assigned
to the other. I think it will be found that the com-
munity of origin is accompanied by a community of
essence, and that what constitutes the poetic spirit
amid all diversities of form is what constitutes the
religious spirit amid all diversities of belief. In the
religious world, as in the poetic world, the point
of union between different schools is the idea of
incarnation. The essence of religion is not the
belief in a particular object of worship, but it is the
belief that, whatever the object of worship may be,
the worshipper himself is made in the image of
that which he adores, This I believe to be the
one element which lies at the root of all religion,
which is common to all diversities of form, and in-
destructible by the suppression of these diversities.
Everything else is but the body of worship; this
is its soul. It is popularly thought that the old
narrative of Genesis is peculiar in its doctrine that
man is made in the image of God. This is a grand
mistake, The Book of Genesis may be peculiar in
The Common Element in Religions. 49
the view which it has of God; it is not singular
in holding that man is made in the image of God.
No sacred writing, no religious ceremony, no the-
ological dogma, no act of faith or prayer, could
possibly be based upon any other foundation. The
postulate of all religion, the condition preliminary
to all worship, is the conviction that between the
worshipped and the worshipper there exists from
the very outset a bond of connection. You can only
believe what you can conceive, and you can only
conceive what is already in your nature. No man
can figure in his imagination any object human or
divine whose elements are not at the present moment
within his own consciousness. The question is not
between a God bearing our own image and a God
bearing a different image; it is between a God
bearing our own image and no God at all. There
may be any amount of diversity in the superstruc-
ture, but the foundation is uniform. The religions
of the earth constitute not a series of temples, but a
single temple. The Father's house may have many
mansions, but the house itself is one and indivisible.
Every form of faith, every mode of worship, every
approach of the human to the divine, rests upon One
and the same foundation—the belief that the human
is already in the image of the divine; other founda-
tion than this can no man lay.
It is well to bear this in view, because it is one
of the subjects on which there has been a great
D
50 Messages of the Old Religions.
misconception. It is often thought that the belief
in the identity of the human with the divine image
is a belief which stamps the worshipper as belonging
to a stage of primitive development. Accordingly,
three forms of reverence have been proposed, each
of which is regarded as a more developed mode of
faith on the ground that it denies this identity.
These three forms are — Deism, Pantheism, and
Scientific Evolution. Each of these is supposed
to mark a higher stage in the progress of thought,
because each of them is supposed to emancipate
the mind from the old doctrine that man is made
in the image of God. Now, whether these be or
be not higher stages of development I shall not
here inquire; but one thing is certain, they are not
higher on the ground alleged. Neither deism nor
pantheism nor scientific evolution is really a de-
parture from the old principle. They differ in their
view of what constitutes the dominant Power in the
universe; they are all based upon the belief that
whatever that Power be, man is made in its image.
The briefest possible examination will tend to make
this clear. *
Deism is the reaction against the idea of a God
manifested in the flesh. It has had two great
movements in history—the One in England, the
other in India ; the one directed against Christianity,
the other against Brahmanism ; the one rising in the
eighteenth century and becoming extinguished in
The Common Element in Religions. 51
the flames of the French Revolution, the other
originating in the nineteenth and continuing to
the present day. But alike of the English and
the Indian movements it must be said, that how-
ever true or however false they may be in them-
selves, they are both failures So far as their purpose
is concerned. That purpose is to establish an object
of worship upon a basis above the world, to unveil
the statue of a God whose nature shall be free from
all the limits of humanity. It is to present to the
eyes of men the portrait of a Being dwelling not in
tabernacles of clay but enthroned in the highest
heavens — a Being Omnipotent, Omniscient, and
eternal, full of all benevolence, rich in all wisdom,
pervaded by all love. Yet, what is this conception
but an incarnation, a God manifest in the flesh?
It is, the wildest delusion to imagine that a man
escapes either Christianity or Brahmanism by run-
ning into deism. He has simply lifted his God
on to a higher physical platform. The attributes
which he reverences in the object of his worship
are essentially human attributes; his God is still
in his own image, though the image is placed in
heaven. When you attribute to the object of
your worship a sense of Omnipotence, what else
have you done than to assign Him a human limit 2
What is a sense of omnipotence but the conscious-
ness that one has power to overcome any obstacle 2
When I say “I can do this,” do I not express the
52 Messages of the Old Religions.
fact that I feel a force within me which is capable
of overcoming a force that I perceive without me !
The very statement implies the idea of an effort
on my part, and the idea of an effort is inseparable
from the idea of a limit. To attribute to the object
of your worship the power to say “I can,” is to
clothe your God in the likeness of a human envi-
ronment. As long as you reverence that which
is personal you can no more escape the idea of in-
Carnation than you can escape your own shadow.
It does not matter where you place the personality;
you may lay it in the heavens above, or you may
deposit it in the depths beneath. Assign it what
locality you please, it is an incarnation still, and
an incarnation equally. It is an incarnation because
it is personal. It is a manifestation of the human
not because it inhabits a human locality but because
it is local anywhere. The moment I have said of
my God, “Lo here,” or “Lo there,” I have given
Him a special habitation, and the moment I have
given Him a special habitation I have embodied
Him in a material form. The effort of deism to
transcend humanity has only ended in the old ideal
of a God walking in the garden.
The second attempt to get rid of a God in the

human image is Pantheism. It seeks to avoid
the human image by imaging God everywhere. ,
Instead of Seeing Him in the likeness of a human
form, it proposes to see Him in the aspect of the
V
The Common Element in Religions. 53
united universe. It looks upon Him not as a life
circumscribed within a particular space, but as a
life pervading all space and filling everything with
its presence—an intelligence that sleeps in the
plant, dreams in the animal, wakes in the man,
vibrates in the wind, and throbs in the star. By
this means pantheism hopes to emancipate the
world from the original and primitive conception
of a Ruler of the universe whose motives and
whose attributes are analogous to the Soul of man.
Yet a deeper reflection will convince us that this
hope of the pantheist is also a dream. Remote as
his conception seems from the idea of a God in
the human image, it is really neither more nor
less than a repetition of that thought in another
form. Where does the pantheist get his conception
of an all-pervading life 2 Is it not from the con-
stitution of man himself? Has not man been called
a microcosm of the universe ? And why has man
received this name 2 Is it not simply because he
exhibits on a small scale the features of the col-
lective whole 2 Man is a union of all the elements
of the world. He unites within himself matter
and spirit, personality and impersonality; the vege-
table, the animal, and the rational. The idea of
an all-pervading life is essentially a human con-
ception, a conception derived from man’s observa-
tion of his own inward nature. The existence which
I call the Soul is distinguished specially by this,

54 Messages of the Old Religions.
that it seems to concentrate into a focus things
which in space and time are vastly apart. It
gathers into one picture stars and systems separated
by millions of miles; it combines into one thought
times and seasons between which ages roll. It is
from this perception of unity in diversity that
man has arrived at the notion of a life which
shall include all other lives. It is because he feels
within himself the influence of a power which
makes the past present and the distant near, that
he conceives in the universe the existence of an
agency which shall be equally diffused through
every form. The question is not whether this
conception be or be not just ; that is a matter for
the apologist. The point for us to observe is that,
whether it be true or false, the thought is dis-
tinctively human, derived from human nature and
suggested by human analogy. Pantheism is no
revolt from the primitive conception of the race.
It is simply the reaffirmation, in a new form, of
that ancient belief which from the beginning has
regulated the rise of religions—the belief that man
is made in the image of God. -
The third attempt by which it has been sought
to set aside the primitive conception is the mod-
ern doctrine of Scientific Evolution. It may seem
strange that I should rank it amongst the systems
of religion. But in truth it has been nearly always
represented as a new form of reverence. The
The Common Element in Religions. 55
Scientific evolutionist proposes to substitute the
veneration of nature for the veneration of powers
above nature, and he is quite willing to print
“nature” with a capital letter. He is willing to
recognise the fact that we are in the presence of
a Force which is perfectly inscrutable, and to
express his sense of its mystery by calling it the
“Unknowable.” All he insists on is the fact that
it is unknowable, and therefore incapable of being
imaged in a human form. He asks us to substitute
the study of natural law for the study of things
which are believed to be supernatural, and to occupy
in the observation of physical phenomena that time
which used to be spent in the investigation of
unseen things.
Now we have no quarrel whatever with the
printing of the word “nature” with a capital letter,
nor do we see anything irreligious in transferring
our veneration from the things which are unseen
to the things which are visible. But we must point
out here once more, that in putting the natural in
the place of the human we have not, as we imagine,
transcended the human. We are really on the lines
of the same primitive conception which dictated the
religious faith of our fathers. The fransition from
the belief in a Power above nature to the belief in a
Power which is identical with nature may appear at
first sight to be a revolt from the old conception
of man in the image of God. But, in the light
56 Messages of the Old Religions.
in which this view is presented by the doctrine of
evolution, we get back everything which has been
taken away. For, what is the doctrine of evolution?
Is it not just the doctrine of the unity of species,
just the belief that all things belong to one and the
same order ? If the scientific evolutionist removes
the pre-eminence from man, he does not give the
pre-eminence to anything else. His aim is rather
a levelling up than a levelling down. He does not
wish so much to deprive human nature of its dignity
as to invest physical nature with the same dignity.
He is not so eager to materialise spirit as to spirit-
ualise matter. He does not seek to deny the pres-
ence of a life in man, but rather to establish the
belief that the life which is present in man is
present also in every object of creation. He says
that matter itself has “the promise and potence of
life.” In that saying he has reaffirmed the old
doctrine of the community of image between man
and the Power which he serves. There is no
longer a possibility of divergence. They both
belong to one order; they are both identical in
nature; they both follow one law of development.
Extremes meet. The doctrine of evolution appears
at first sight to be at the furthest remove from the
old doctrine of man in the image of God; yet in
reality it only affirms that belief in a new form.
IFor the name “God” it substitutes the “Universe,”
but it invests this Universe with the attributes.
The Common Element in Religions. 57
which men of old time applied to God. It invests
it with the right to be venerated. It demands for
it the self-surrender of the will. It claims for it
the service of the hand and the obedience of the
life; the alteration in its mode of worship lies
chiefly in its change of name. But there is no
change in its conception of the relation of man to
the object of his veneration. If he was told by
the men of old time that he was made in the
image of God, he is told by the doctrine of evolution
that he is made in the image of the Universe. He
is asked to surrender himself to the latter on pre-
cisely the same ground on which he was asked to
surrender himself to the former—the ground that
he himself is in the likeness of that which he
venerates. If he is required to submit himself to
natural laws and to resign himself to the leading
of nature, it is on the understanding that he him-
self is not only a product of these laws, but a part
of that system of nature which demands the sur-
render of his will.
We arrive, then, at this conclusion: The common
element in all religion is the idea of incarnation,
the belief in the identity of nature between man
and the object of his worship. The difference he-
tween one religion and another is a difference of
ideal; but, the ideal once given, all religions unite
in the belief that the worshipper has some point
of analogy to that which he worships. It is not so
58 Messages of the Old Religions.
much a doctrine of religion as a presupposition
necessary to the very existence of religion. On the
acceptance or the rejection of this belief depends the
question whether man shall or shall not worship at
all. All efforts at divine communion are based upon
the recognition that there is a common ground on
which the human can meet with the divine. It is
the root of all prayer; it is the Source of all sacri-
fice; it is the key to all devotion. Take this away,
and you take away not any form of religion, but
religion itself; not any article of faith, but the very
possibility of faith. Communion with any being
either in earth or heaven demands as a preliminary
condition that there should exist between the com-
municants one element at least in common, one trait
of identical experience. It is only on the ground of
such an experience, and it is only So far as such an
experience extends, that there can be any religion
in the heart or any veneration in the life. Religious
faith is the recognition of Something above me, but
I can only learn that it is above me through some
phase of my nature on which I meet it as an equal.
If it be so, there follows one consideration which
is of great interest to the missionary. It is of no
use for the missionary to begin his crusade by vin-
dicating the possibility of an incarnation: that is
already common ground. When the disciple of
Christ goes into India to conquer the disciple of
Vishnu, he commonly begins by proclaiming the
The Common Element in Religions. 59
doctrine of a Word made flesh. He has no need
to proclaim that doctrine; it has been proclaimed
already. It lies at the root not only of the disciple
of Vishnu's Creed, but of all creeds. It is the basis
of universal worship, and the ground on which all
religions can already stand in brotherhood. The
question between the disciple of Christ and the dis-
ciple of Vishnu is not whether the Word has been
made flesh, but whether, after being made flesh,
the Word is worth worshipping. The difference
between Christ and Vishnu lies not in their incar-
nation but in their nature. If the worship of Vishnu
presents a poor result in comparison with the wor-
ship of Christ, it is not because the One is in the
flesh and the other out of it, but because the one is
a rich and the other an empty ideal. The whole
importance lies in the nature of that image after
which man fashions himself. If the image be noble,
the life will be noble ; if the image be mean, the
life will be mean. What the Christian missionary -
has to impart to other lands is not any doctrine
about his ideal, but his ideal itself. India is nar-
rower than Europe not by the absence of its belief
in incarnation, but by the fact that it incarnates
something whose nature is not onlargod. What wo
want beyond all other things in the modern mis-
sionary is the proclamation of a moral ideal, the
Setting up of an image which shall itself be noble
and in whose likeness it shall be good to be made.
60 Messages of the Old Religions.
That is the reason why the preaching of the modern
missionary should be above all things a moral preach-
ing. His initial note must not be the Thirty-nine
Articles but the Sermon on the Mount, not the
insistence on a dogma but the revelation of a life.
There are many who hold that the basis of Chris-
tianity is the belief in the doctrine of incarnation.
So it is ; but it is the basis not of Christianity alone,
but of all religions and all possibilities of religion.
What distinguishes Christianity is the largeness and
the fulness of that which is incarnated; and the
largeness and the fulness lie in its moral standard.
In the holding up of that standard, in the presen-
tation of that image in its unselfish majesty and its
sacrificial power, the Christian missionary will attain
his twofold object of revealing the distinctiveness of
his own religion and preserving at the same time its
brotherhood with other faiths.
The Message of China. 61
CHA PTER III.
T II E ME S S A G E OF CIH IN A.
THE various attempts to trace the historical develop-
ment of religions have for the most part been dis-
tinguished by the diversity of their starting-point.
There has been no general agreement as to their
order of precedence, as to which has gone before and
which followed. No universal consent has estab-
lished any religion in a position of Superior antiquity.
Each in turn has claimed the priority in time, and
each in turn has found Supporters and advocates
of its claim. Some have placed China in the front
as regards ancientness;" Some have given the palm
to India; some have bestowed the laurel on Persia;
some have claimed the crown for Judea. My own
opinion is that there are no facts to establish any
* There seems to be evidence for the statement that portions
of Chinese territory were the seat of organised communities two
thousand years before Christ. See Prichard's Researches, iv. 476.
480; Gutzlaff, Chinese History, i. 75, English translation. Tenouf
makes China the oldest civilisation (Hibbert Lectures, 1879, p.
124). -
62 Messages of the Old Religions.
of these claims, or, to speak more correctly, that
there are equal facts for and against all of them.
Every one of them has in it elements that point to
a remote antiquity; every one of them has in it
elements that indicate a comparatively late stage of
the world’s development. I believe that the relation
of these religions to one another is not the relation
between the steps of a ladder but the relation be-
tween the branches of a tree. They seem to me to
be not successive but simultaneous, radiating at one
moment from a single trunk. I have already indi-
cated my conviction that the trunk itself has been
produced by a process of historical sequence. I
have pointed out in the introductory chapter what
seem to me to be the successive steps of that devel-
opment by which religion passed from a germ into
an actual existence. But when religion has become
an existence, there is no reason in the world why
its progress should be only that of succession. No
man holds that in the tree of human life the devel-
opment of the plant must be completed before the
development of the animal can begin. Is there any
more reason for holding that in the tree of religious
life two different phases of intellectual growth should
not be contemporaneously existent 2 Is it not con-
sistent with all analogy, that when Once the com-
mon basis of religious life has been , formed, the
- different branches of that life should break forth
almost simultaneously, and should ºxhibit at one
The Message of China. 63
moment the graduated fruits of a higher and a lower
culture ?
Adopting, then, this standpoint, and waiving all
questions of precedence, let us allow each branch to
stand for itself. Instead of considering the place
which one religion occupies in relation to another,
let us try to find that feature in each religion which
is distinctive, and that in each distinctive element
which is of greatest significance. If by this course
our work shall be less philosophical, it shall be less
speculative and more on a level with experience.
What we want to find is not a frame but a picture;
not a theory into which we can get things to fit, but
a portraiture of the things themselves. Let us look,
then, at this branch of the religious tree which we
call “China.” The question for us is not, What is
its nature ? but, What is its distinctiveness 2 What
is that which makes the branch “China” different
from the branch “India” or “Persia” or “Egypt”
I may be reminded that this is a very wide question.
I may be told that there are three distinct twigs in
the branch “China,” and that these are distinguished
from each other by strong marks of opposition. It
is quite true; but beneath the opposition there is
somcthing common to theill all, something which
makes each of them Chinese, and not Indian,
Persian, or Egyptian. What is this distinctly
national characteristic It certainly does not lie in
the branch itself. There is nothing peculiar in any
64 Messages of the Old Religions.
Chinese doctrine, nothing that may not be easily
paralleled in the creeds of other lands. What, then,
is that element which has given to the religion of
China an aspect almost special, and has impressed
upon its features the mark of Something approaching
very near to originality ?
To resume the metaphor, let us look at the branch
again. As we have said, there is nothing peculiar
in its nature; but is there nothing peculiar in its
attitude 2 Yes; if we examine it carefully we shall
find that it differs from the surrounding branches
in its direction. All the Surrounding branches shoot
forwards; the Chinese branch is bent backwards to-
wards the tree. The peculiarity of this religion in
all its forms is one and the same—its regressiveness.
It would not be correct to say that it is a religion
without desire, but, in the strict Sense of the word,
it is a religion without aspiration. The bird that
sits on this branch is not tuneless, but it is wingless;
it does not want song, but it wants the power of
upward flight. The religions of surrounding nations
are all movements towards the future; they seek
rest by the wings of a dove that can lift them
beyond the seen and temporal. The religion of
China is also in search of rest, but it seeks it in
the opposite quarter. It sees the home of its spirit
not in the future but in the past; not in the attempt
to fly away from the seen and temporal, but in the
effort to reach the origin of the seen and temporal,
The Message of China. 65
Its hope to find rest lies not in looking up to the
heights of heaven, but in contemplating and in
seeking the foundations of the earth."
I have said that this description applies to the
whole of China. I wish to emphasise the fact, be-
cause there is a popular notion that this nation
exhibits rather a conflict of religions than one uni-
form faith. It is true that it does exhibit a conflict
of religions, but my contention is that in spite of
their diversity they are united by one common
element which makes them distinctively Chinese.
That common element is regressiveness; in all of
them the branch is bent backwards. The truth of
this will appear if we glance for a moment at the
different forms of Chinese faith. I wish to avoid
all technical language and to present above all
things a lucid exposition. Accordingly, while I
shall make use of only the old facts, I shall try to
put them rather in an English than in a Chinese
dress. I shall say, then, that, excluding the form
of faith called Chinese Buddhism, which is not a
native growth of the country, there remain three
religious parties in China. The first and the furthest
back are the worshippers of the ancestral dead,
those who keep their reverence for the spirits of the
departed. We have seen in the introductory chapter
* The whole character of the Chinese mind is in keeping with
this tendency, being essentially prosaic. See Pauthier, Chine, p.
43: Paris, 1839.
E
66 Messages of the Old Religions.
that this form of belief is one of the earliest in the
history of religions; and the fact that from the very
beginning it has prevailed in China would seem to
favour the notion of that nation's antiquity. It
would do so, if there were no other explanation.
But there is another explanation, and one which lies
nearer to the door. Out of the multitude of possible
objects of worship, why should the Chinaman have
selected this? In the presence of Sun and moon and
stars, in the vicinity of mountains and lakes and
rivers, in the contact with living kings and existing
mighty men, why should he from the outset have
fixed his veneration upon something which is neither
visible nor present, but departed ? It cannot be his
reverence for things beyond the earth, for he does
not reverence things beyond the earth. The very
fact that he has fixed his mind not on celestial
spirits but on the spirits of the departed dead, is
significant; it shows that in some form his venera-
tion must be connected with the earth. Why, then,
with so many earthly things around him, has he put
them all aside in order to bestow his reverence on
something which is unseen, unheard, impalpable,
incognisable by any human sense or through any
worldly channel ? Does not the reason lie in the
nature of the Chinese mind itself 2 Is it not clear
that to the Chinaman the spirits of the past are
more venerated than the Spirits of the present pre-
cisely because his own constitutional tendency is
The Message of China. 67
ever towards the past ! We see individual minds
of this nature; why not individual nations ! The
Chinaman's mental constitution is not the effect of
his worship; his worship is the effect of his mental
constitution. He reverences his ancestors more than
his descendants because his mind is by nature retro-
spective and regressive. The branch of the religious
tree is bent backwards because the heart of the
man is bent backwards. I do not believe that to
the educated Chinese the worship of ancestors is
anything more than a commemorative anniversary,
the observance of a festival of gratitude to the mem-
ory of the good and great who have passed away.
But even as such, it is characteristic, significant
of the national intellect. It shows that even in the
earliest times, in that age of childhood in which a
nation like an individual is generally prompted to
press forward, the mind of the Chinaman was true
to its future self, and, in strict accordance with its
whole subsequent destiny, preferred the yesterday
that was gone to the morrow that was coming.
The second form of religious reverence in China.
is the faith which was revived by Confucius, and
which bears the name of its reviver. Tut roundly,
and expressed in English characters, the doctrine of
Confucius may be said to be, the search for an ideal
heaven through the rediscovery of a primitive earth.*
* Confucius himself declares that he cites the patterns left us by
the ancients. See Pauthier, Chine, p. 134.
6S Messages of the Old Religions.
He proposes to lead men to a conception of the
heavenly state by leading them back, by causing
them to retrace their steps over the road by which
they have travelled. The whole gist and marrow of
the doctrine is regressiveness. The Chinaman looks
out upon the existing aspect of Society and he con-
templates it with dissatisfaction. He has no hope
whatever that his dissatisfaction will be removed
by the advance of time; it is to the advance of
time that he traces the corruption. Every increase
of civilisation, every development of culture, every
progress in the arts of life, presents to his mind the
aspect of a decline. His perpetual cry is the prayer
of the Jewish king, “Let the shadow go back ten
degrees.” It seems to him that what society wants
to make it perfect is a process of divestiture. If
man would see in earth a miniature of heaven, he
must strip the earth of its adventitious ornaments.
He must go back to a time when men dwelt in
primitive simplicity. He must make a retrograde
movement towards the dawn of civilisation, for in
its dawn lies its glory. He must seek those be-
ginnings of life in which communities were united
not by the laws of the state but by the instincts
of the life, not by bonds from without but by ob-
ligations from within. He proposes to revive the
patriarchal age—to restore the glories of the family,
to build the state in its image and to see God in
that image. The father is to become again at once
— The Message of China. 69
the king and the priest of the household;" he is
to rule over all and he is to sacrifice for all. Wife
and child and domestic servant are alike to be
subject to his will; but he in turn is to be subject
to their need. Sarah may protest if Abraham
should desert her; Jacob may run away if Isaac
should forget his fatherhood. It is to be a society
founded on reciprocal rights. Ancestral Seniority is
to confer the right of rule, but juniority is to confer
the right of being protected. If the father as sov-
ereign is to wield the highest Sceptre, as Sovereign
also he is to bear the weightiest burden. He is
not merely to be the priest for himself but for his
household. Every sin of any member of the family
is to be the father's sin; he is to bear the burden,
he is to meet the penalty, he is to offer the sacrifice;
his responsibility is to be proportionate to his power.
Such is the ideal of family life which the follower
of Confucius proposes to revive. And when he has
revived it, his work is only half done; he has to
build into its likeness the fabric of the body politic.
He has to construct a state which shall be modelled
after the similitude of the household, to rear an
empire which shall be fashioned after the image of
the family. Here again, as in the life of the fam-
ily, the summit of power is the summit of sacrifice.
* Ever since the patriarchal period of China these two offices
have been actually united in the Emperor. See Gutzlaff, Chinese
History, i. 142, 143.
70 Messages of the Old Religions.
The emperor is the head of the state, and as such
he has almost absolute control, but he is only the
Jºing because he is the father of his people. If he
is the greatest man in the state, he is also the most
burdened—strictly speaking, the only burdened man.
If a sacrifice has to be presented to heaven, it is the
emperor alone who presents it. It is not that the
emperor alone is allowed to have his sins forgiven;
it is rather that all sins are sins of the emperor.
EHe alone is the Sacrificer because only he has been
the transgreSSOr. The individual units of the nation
are but the members of the imperial life," and the
imperial life is answerable for the multitude of in-
dividual sins. Such is the Confucian ideal of a
kingdom—an ideal never realised, never attempted
to be realised in practice, yet existing as an object
of imaginary memory. And to crown the whole,
the ideal of the kingdom of earth is to the mind
of the Chinaman the ideal also of the kingdom of
heaven. Other religions have looked forward to
their millennium as something which is to be con-
summated in the golden future; to the follower of
Confucius it is something which was realised in the
remotest past. To find it he is not required to press
forward but to look backward, not to seek the set-
* The emperor himself, viewed as an individual unit or private
person, is of no more account than his people ; he gets his value
purely from his official character. Many emperors have in private
'not belonged to the school of Confucius, See article in ‘Nouveau,
Journal Asiatique ' (1854), iv. 292 sq.
ºf . The Message of China. 71
ting but the rising sun. The kingdom of heaven
has to him its ideal not in the advance of human
development but in the original constitution of the
most primitive human society. The Jew has his
Garden of Eden, but it fades from his sight in the
vision of a coming and a higher glory; the China-
man has nothing to counterpoise the vision of his
Eden, and he sees no glory but that which is passed
away. - .
I shall point out in the Sequel wherein consists
at once the truth and the fallacy of this Confucian
view, and shall endeavour to indicate the reason
why a really high theory has proved utterly in-
effectual to furnish to this people a source of aspira-
tion. But in the meantime let me briefly pass to
the one remaining party amongst the original beliefs
of China. We have seen how in the worship of the
ancestral dead the nation reverted to a memory
instead of a hope. We have seen how in the
idealising of a primitive society the Chinese mind
again sought its anchor on the receding rather than
on the approaching shore. We are now in the final
phase to see another and yet a different form of the
same tendency. The final phase is that strange
creed which, at a period almost contemporary with
Confucius, found its exponent in the mystic Lāo-
tze." And here once more regression is the order
* The system is called Tāoism, from a word Tao, whose ety.
mology is uncertain, but which Seems to indicate the surrender
72 - Messages of the Old Religions.
of the day. If the ancestral worshipper proposed
for imitation the men of a previous age, if the fol-
lower of Confucius sought his model in the imagin-
ation of a primitive Society, the disciple of Lāo-tze
virtually went further back still. He proposed in
effect that man should retrace his steps into the
life of the plant. He does not use the simile, but
he clearly expresses the thought. He looks upon
modern Society—the Society of his own age—as a
departure from primitive simplicity. What makes
it a departure from primitive simplicity is the accu-
mulated product of human consciousness. Man has
become too reflective, too calculating, too aiming.
IHe has set himself against the stream of nature,
and has tried to alter the course of that stream.
Everything in the world but himself yields itself -
up to the order of nature. Man alone resists its
order, and therefore man alone is unhappy. If he
would cease to be unhappy, let him become what
other things are—unconscious.* Let him yield him-
self again to that fixed order of nature which he is
powerless to change. Let him go back to the life
of the vegetable, which lives without knowing that
it lives, and grows without considering its growth.
to a fixed order. For some definitions of the word, see Professor
T}ouglas, ‘Confucianism and Tāoism,’ p. 189; also Watters, ‘Lāo-
tze, a Study in Chinese Philosophy, p. 45.
* The admiration of the principle of unconsciousness in the
system of Lāo-tze will be found expressed in ‘Tao-te-King,”
Julien’s edition, Introduction, p. xiii.
sº- The Message of China. 73
Let him become spontaneous, uncalculating, aimless;
let him cease to map out a plan for his earthly
life or a means for his daily bread. His course is
mapped out already in a fixed and unalterable way.
He needs no ship nor helm nor Oar, no Sail nor chart
nor compass. He has only to become sea-weed, and
to drift, ignoring himself and everything around;
the order of nature will do the rest.
I have thus tried in a few sentences to describe
rather than to define the system of Lāo-tze. It will
be seen on the very surface to present in some
respects a marked and direct contrast to the con-
temporaneous view of Confucius, and in point of
fact these two systems have been generally viewed
as indicating contrary aspects of the Chinese mind.
Confucius belongs to the outward order; Lāo-tze
to the mystical and introvertive. Confucius is
occupied with the problem of Social wellbeing;
Lāo-tze is concerned only with the peace of the
individual. Confucius is inspired by the pride of
empire; Tā0-tze is desirous above all things to sink
into humility—not the humility of thinking lowly
of one's self, but the humility of not thinking at all.
Confucius requires in the members of the State an
interest in the common welfare; Lāo-tze seeks a
mystical resignation, in which all interest, common
or individual, is forgotten. These are the points of
contrast, and I do not attempt to deny them. But
I say that these points of contrast are only two
74 Messages of the Old Religions.
opposite tendencies Sof one national ideal—the spirit
of regress. Just as the Same Sense of guilt may
wake on the cheek of one man the blush of shame,
and dim that of another with the pallor of fear, so
has the national spirit of China expressed itself in
one instance by an exhibition of materialism, and in
another by a display of material crucifixion. The
system of Confucius and the system of Lao-tze are
both modes of one spirit, and of that spirit which
essentially belongs to China. They are both regres--
sions toward the past; their difference lies simply
in the fact that the one goes further back than the
other. Confucius retraces his steps to the primitive
age of man, and attempts to find there a model for
the ages to come; Lāo-tze retraces his steps to an
age more primitive still, and seeks in the life of the
unconscious plant to bury the burden of human grief.
and care. The difference in their form is acciden-
tal; the One thing not accidental is their common
motive of regressiveness. This is in all the forms of
Chinese faith the essentially national feature, the
one element which distinctively and for ever marks
out this branch from all the Surrounding branches
of the religious tree. Neither ancestral worship,
nor the doctrine of Confucius, nor the creed of
Lão-tze, presents anything that is new ; each of
them can be paralleled by things analogous in other
climes. The element which is distinctive of China
amongst the religions of antiquity is the fact that,
The Message of China. 75
whether in the worship of the departed, or in the
search for a new kingdom, or in the pursuit of a
mystical goal, the Chinaman is actuated by one and
the same desire—the desire to regain the standpoint
of an earlier day.
This, then, is the message of China to the religious
world, “Go back.” It is a strange, weird, unex-
pected message, altogether unlike what one looks for
in such a sphere, and altogether unique amongst the
voices of surrounding nations. “Speak to the chil-
dren of Israel that they go forward” are the words
which are inscribed on the threshold of the Jewish
temple. They form the key-note to the whole his-
tory of that people. And they are the key-note of
that music to which marches nearly all religious his-
tory. The impulse to go forward, to press toward
the mark of a coming prize, to leave the acquisi-
tions of the past behind in the pursuit of a higher
goal, has been the almost unbroken aim of the re-
ligions of mankind. India presses forward to the
future, and in all the forms of her faith seeks
refuge from the present hour in a state to come.
Persia presses forward to the future, and looks
for a solution of the problem to the ripening circles
of the Suns. Twen Tgypt presses forward LU Llle
future; the motto of her pyramids is not so much
the glory of antiquity as the power of everlasting-
mess; she seeks to build something which shall
endure. But here is a voice which seems disso-
76 Messages of the Old Religions.
nant amidst the other voices, a voice which says
“Go back,” where the others say “Go forward.” It
is remarkable by its very contrast; it arrests us
by its discordance. Nor is it a voice which can be
drowned by the others. In point of fact it has not
been drowned. It has been powerful enough to
arrest for centuries the development of one of the
most extensive empires in the world. What is the
secret of this power ? That it has a secret is
beyond question. It is not to be accounted for by
anything on the surface. Climate will not explain
it, for it looks behind the existing climate. Soil.
will not explain it, for it ignores the present soil.
Priestcraft will not explain it, for the sceptre which
it wields is precisely that sceptre which priestcraft
would avoid—the empire of primitive culture over
existing forms of civilisation. Where are we to look
for the source of that strength which has been able
to attract and to retain the minds of millions under
allegiance to an ideal of the past 7
In answering this question, let us first consider
whether, in the history of religions, there be any-
thing analogous to this tendency of the Chinese
empire. I have said that it is Something unique
amidst Surrounding nations. Is there anything like
it amongst nations which are not surrounding 2 Is
it a purely isolated phenomenon in the sphere of
religious thought 2 I think it is not. I believe
that we shall find the true analogue to the tendency
The Message of China. 77
of the Chinese mind if we extend our gaze into a
wider circle. It does not, as we have Said, present
in this respect any point of contact with India or
Persia or Egypt; but it does present a point of con-
tact with something which is at once more modern
and more universal—the religion of Christ. What
is the secret of Christianity's moral power ? Strange
as it may seem, it is regressiveness. We commonly
boast of it as a religion of progress; and so, doubt-
less, it is. But it is a progress which has been
professedly reached by a process of retrogression.
The initial command of Christianity is the com-
mand to go back. The Christian soldier receives
at the outset the order to retreat. The distinctive
motto of this faith is the preliminary necessity of
regress, “Except ye be turned back and become as
little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom
of heaven.” In these words there is a thoroughly
Chinese ring—a more distinctly Chinese ring than
that which is supposed to reverberate in Christ's
golden rule. Here, as in the faith of China, we
have set before the mind the ideal of a great State
or empire which is to represent in its nature the
rule of the Highest—a kingdom of heaven. Here
we have set before the mind the same possibility
which besets the eye of the Chinaman—the possi-
bility that this kingdom may be actually attained
by the earth. But here too, in more striking
resemblance still, the road to the attainment of
78 Messages of the Old Religions.
the goal is declared to be a regressive road. It is
declared that no amount of progress, no advance
of civilisation, no addition of extraneous materials
can of themselves hasten the coming of the king-
dom. The first step must be not a learning but
an unlearning, not a clothing but an unclothing,
not an onward development but a backward march.
What is wanted above all things and before all
things is a new beginning, an entrance for the
second time into the stage of birth, the resuming
of life in the form of a little child.
The key-note of Christianity is redemption — a
buying back. It expresses the thought that what
man wants for his amelioration is, first and foremost,
a regressive movement, the power to become a new
creature. And a moment's reflection must con-
vince every one that Christianity has here struck a
note of nature. The deepest want of human nature
will be found to lie, not in the absence of some future
good, but in the presence of some old experience, in
the fact that we are still in contact with some ele-
ment of the past. Wherein, for example, consists
the powerlessness of mere morality to effect a re-
form of the life 2 Is it not precisely in the know-
ledge that, in order to be reformed, the life must
first be renewed ? You tell a drunkard of the
miseries awaiting him in this and other worlds
if he persists in his downward course; you point
out the necessity for imposing a restraint on him-
The Message of China. 79
self, and for cultivating above all things the virtue
of abstinence. Why is it that the man to whom
you speak, while perfectly conceding the truth of
your every sentiment, is perfectly uninfluenced by
any motive of reform 2 It is because he knows
in his inmost heart that no reform of present
action would really make him a new man. It is
no use to tell him that the practice of sobriety
would free him from future torments; he knows
that it would only do so by bringing actual tor-
ments into the day and hour. Abstinence in itself
is simply thirst, and thirst ungratified is torture.
The root of the evil lies in the past, probably in
the ancestral past. If the man could reverence his
ancestors, he would have hope; but this is precisely
what he cannot do. He has received from these
ancestors an heirloom of misery. What he wants
above all things is a new beginning, a rolling back
of the shadow. Until he can cast back his eye upon
a past without blemish, upon a heredity without
taint, upon an ancestry without spot or flaw, he
feels that every attempt at present reform is sim-
ply an effort to exchange one misery for another, to
substitute for the inroads of passion on the body
the ravages of passion on the soul.
Now this cry for a new beginning is precisely
what Christianity professes to meet and satisfy.
Its power over the moral life lies mainly in the
fact that it claims to lead back that life to a fresh
SO Messages of the Old Religions.
starting-point, or, to use its own words, “to pure
fountains of living water.” The strength of Christ-
ianity lies in its claim to reach the “fountains.”
It does not propose to purify any Special part of
the stream. It proposes to go back to the begin-
ning, to the stream's source. It offers to alter the
whole course of life's flow by making a new com-
mencement, by pouring into human nature a fresh
flood of heredity. Its watchword is, not inappropri-
ately, “Salvation by blood.” It proclaims to the
world that it needs to be revivified, born again. It
tells the race of men that their blood has become
impure, tainted, corrupted; it tells them that no mid-
way cure will have any effect in arresting the mal-
ady, that moral abstinence will at best only remedy
the symptoms, not check the disease. It tells them
that what they want is new blood, a fresh stream of
vitality flowing from a new fountain and interrupt-
ing altogether the course of the old heredity. It
proclaims this necessity, and it offers to supply it.
And herein to the mind of the first Christian age lay
the secret of its power. Its earliest crown was not
its aspiration towards the future but its regress to-
wards the past, its promise to roll back the shadows
and let the Soul begin anew. It was this which
fascinated the mind of a Paul; it was this which
made to him the difference between law and grace.
Other systems might offer him incentives to moral
reformation; other creeds might inspire him with
The Message of China. --- 81
motives to abstain from old vices; Christianity
alone presented the hope of a buried past, the pros-
pect of becoming a new creature by starting afresh -
and unencumbered, with the heart of a little child
and with a heredity pure as heaven.
Now, such was in germ the religious message of
the Chinese empire. Through all the absurdity of
its details there rings this one note of truth—the
necessity for a retraced past. In the heart of the
Chinaman there was present a true instinct when
he placed on the threshold of his temple the image
of a new beginning. Every nation that has looked
back to a paradise in the past has been prompted
so to look back by an anticipation of the Christian
impulse, by a Sense of that great need which Christ-
ianity has claimed to supply. The Chinese empire
has felt in her collective unity what every earnest
individual man has felt in his single personality—
that in order to advance there must be retreat, that
in order to reach the goal there must be a return
to the starting-point. This is her message to the
world, this is her truth for all ages, and by this,
even in her dilapidation and decay, she being dead
yet speaketh.
Why, then, does she not speak effectually 2 Why
has her message to the world been, after all, only in
germ 2 Christianity, like the Chinese empire, has
proclaimed to the world the necessity before all
things of a regressive march, and Christianity by
F
82 Messages of the Old Religions.
that proclamation has initiated its triumph. The
religions of China have never triumphed; even in
the stagnant East they have not held their own.
Wherein lies the difference 2 It lies, after all, on
the very surface. Christianity has proclaimed the
necessity for a new beginning, but it has done so
only for the sake of a new ending. It has declared
that, in order to inherit the kingdom, the man must
become a child; but it has made this declaration not
for the sake of the child but for the sake of the man.
Childhood is not the goal of Christianity. The re-
tracing of the past is in itself no object; it is only
the means to an object. If it proposes to go back
to pure fountains of water, it is merely that through
this purity it may inaugurate a new stream. Its
paradise is not in the past but in the future; it re-
treats that it may advance. The regress is but a
preliminary step, and it is taken with a view to
higher progress. Hence Christianity has been, of all
religions, the most progressive; of all faiths, that
which has marched most abreast of the times. No
form of worship has had so many environments, and
no form of worship has so fitted itself to its environ-
ments. The reason is that it has proclaimed the
emptying of the Soul not for the sake of emptiness,
but only with the view to a more Satisfactory replen-
ishment. It has proposed the removal of old prepos-
sessions in order that the Spirit of man may meet the
world with a fresh eye and possess all things new.
The Message of China. 83
How different is it with China | Here, as in the
case of Christianity, there has been a regress towards
the past, but here the regress has been for its own
Sake. The Christian goes back in order that he may
come more forward; the Chinaman goes back that
he may rest under primeval shadows. The Christ-
ian's paradise is always in the future ; the China-
man's always in the past. The Christian's regress
is a means; the Chinaman's a goal. It is this which
constitutes, from an intellectual point of view, the
IIlain and the crowning difference between the two
religions; it is in this lies the secret of the one's
progress and the other's decline. The religion of
Christ and the religions of China have struck a com-
mon note of truth in seeking emancipation from the
present by a regress into the past. But Christianity
has alone perceived that the value of such a retreat
is its preparation for a new outset. China has mis-
taken the means for the goal, has reverenced anti-
quity for its own sake. Nor is this the worst; she
is seeking from antiquity what is not to be found
there. The ideal of the Chinese religion is not a
low ideal; it is on the whole lofty and grand. The
error is rather intellectual than moral, rather in the
judgmont than in the Soul. China has erred not in
what she hopes for, but in where she expects to find
it. Her picture of a kingdom is good and pure, but
she has made a mistake in imagining that the past
could realise such a picture. She has made a mis-
A
84 - Messages of the Old Religions.
take in supposing that the goal she has figured to
herself could ever be reached in going back, could
ever be attained anywhere but in the ripeness of
future development. She has placed her Eden in
the primitive age, and she has been oblivious of the
fact that, could she reach the gates of that primi-
tive age, she would find only the flaming sword,
without the cherubim.
To bring out this point, let us take the two great
Chinese systems of which we have spoken — the
system of Confucius and the system of Lāo-tze—and
let us see how in each of them the conception is the
reverse of primitive. The doctrine of Confucius is
the idea of a kingdom which shall be based on the
lines of the patriarchal age. In going back to the
patriarchal age, Confucius is actuated by a very lofty
motive. He wants to build up a State after the
model of a family, to have the relations of politi-
cal life rooted and grounded in reciprocal love. He
divides the Order of Society into five great relations
—father and Son, husband and wife, elder brother
and younger, master and servant, friend and friend.
He seeks to adjust between these a bond of sympathy
which shall at once be true and eternal, and which
shall, moreover, typify in its pure perfection the
life of the kingdom of heaven. He rightly judges
that, in Order to adjust such relations, he must seek
a new beginning, must roll back that tide of existing
corruptions which have been the product of years
The Message of China. 85
of misgovernment. But does he judge rightly in
thinking that the new beginning is to be itself
the goal % Assuredly not; it is here lies the error
of his system and the mistake of his nation. It
would seem that, of all things, the purity of family
relationships belongs least to the primitive age." It
would seem as if it were one of those ideas which
peculiarly require the fostering hand of a long devel-
opment. Be this as it may, it is quite certain that
it is not to be found in the Chinaman's patriarchal
age. Perhaps the purest delineation of such an age
ever given to the world is that exhibited in the Book
of Genesis; and yet, with all its idyllic features, it
is far from pure. It is a state of society for which
one may well apologise, but which no Western mind
would ever wish to reproduce. And why Ž I would
answer, just because it is patriarchal. It is the
reign of the father distinctively—that is to say, as
distinguished from the reign of the mother. Wher-
ever such a society prevails there is one uniform
result; instead of monarchy being lost in fatherhood,
fatherhood is lost in monarchy. The patriarchal
relation has been an effort to obliterate the sense
of power in the ties of home, but it has always
ended in obliterating the ties of home in the sense
of power; instead of the king becoming a father,
* Dr Lauder Lindsay adduces authorities to prove that the family
relation itself is a comparatively late stage of animal evolution (Mind
in the Lower Animals, i. 41, par. 12 and sq.)
86 Messages of the Old Religions.
the father has become a king. And the reason is
plain. It is not the parent as such that is exalt-
ed; it is only one member of the parental relation.
The father of the family is crowned to the exclusion
and to the disparagement of the mother. The fact
is significant ; it shows that despotism, and not
home-life, is the ruling motive. If Western civili-
sation has increasingly reached the ideal of a State
modelled on family relations, it is because Western
civilisation has started from a different ideal of the
family itself. It is because it has learned to rever-
ence not merely the paternal but the parental, not
merely the headship over the household but the
participation in a common life.
It is because it has started from the patriai'chal
ideal as the model of political excellence, that the
Chinese empire has failed to realise the perfection
for which it is seeking. The failure has been evi-
denced, alike in its speculative and in its practical
life. Its speculative life has been utterly dwarfed
in its development. It seems to have started with
a monotheistic idea of God, and Dr Legge maintains
that this is the earliest conception in its whole
religious history." But whither has it departed 2
The first has in this instance not been the last.
The idea of God has retired into the background,
and its place has been taken by the idea of the
* Religions of China, p. 16.
The Message of China. 87
kingdom of heaven." The Chinaman has sur-
rendered himself to the thought of a divine order,
but he has ceased to think of a divine Orderer.
|He has nowhere denied it but he has everywhere
ignored it, and the ignoring is more remarkable
when it comes as the sequel of a previous recogni-
tion. Is not the inference plain 2 The Chinaman's
idea of God has been corrupted by his own system.
He has started with the notion of monarchy in the
household, and therefore the idea of fatherhood has
become to him a synonym for distance. He has
transferred to heaven his ideal of the home-life,
until heaven itself has ceased to be associated with
anything which is near. God is only felt by His
rule, and He rules from afar; He is Himself unseen,
unfelt, unknown, and unknowable. It is the same
result which is found afterwards in the history of
Judea. The constant contemplation of a patriarchal
God identified fatherhood with monarchy, until the
idea of divine care was lost in the thought of divine
majesty. The God of Judea, like the God of China,
retired into the remote distance and ceased to be a
recognised agent in the development of things be-
low. The only difference was that, while the Jew
filled up the gulf by the interposition of a hierarchy
of angels, the Chinaman left the gulf unfilled, and
* It is only fair to state that the most modern development of
Confucianism is to some extent regressive towards the primitive
theistic standpoint.
88 Messages of the Old Religions.
denied to the spirit of man a vision of aught beyond
the earth."
And in practical life also the influence of the
Chinese ideal has been equally cramping. It has
had a peculiar effect in lowering the standard of
woman. Not that the position of woman in China
is more subordinate than in other parts of the
East; in this respect the Chinese empire compares
even favourably. But the point is, that from the
hopes held out by Confucianism one would have
expected a complete subversion of the Eastern sub-
ordination of woman. One would have expected
that a creed whose leading principle was justice,
whose leading article was reciprocity, whose lead-
ing aim was the establishment of a kingdom which
should be based on the adjustment of the rights of
man, would have found for womanhood a worthy
and a ruling sphere. Proposing as it did to fash-
ion the kingdom after the model of the family,
we should have thought that in this kingdom the
influence of the female would have had dominant
sway. It has not been so, and why Z Clearly be-
cause the Chinaman, in starting from the ideal of
family life, has started from that ideal in its most
primitive form. He has sought to find the per-
* On the impersonal character of the later object of Chinese
worship, see M*Clatchie's “Paper on Chinese Theology” in the
Journal of the Asiatic Society,’ xvi. 397.
The Message of China. 89
fection of family relationships in the type called
patriarchal, and the result has been that on the
very threshold of his development the idea of the
parent has been swamped in the idea of the mon-
arch. Power, masculine power, arbitrary power, has
become from the very outset the symbol and the
goal of the life of home, and instead of the kingdom
being built up after the model of a household, the
household has been constructed after the model
of a kingdom. In such a society, by the very
nature of the case, woman can have no ruling
sphere. Her position is by necessity one of entire
subordination. The empire belongs not to the
parent but to the father, and the submission of
the child is based not on love but on law. Hence
Chinese society has been what the Chinese empire
has been—a state destitute of feminine features,”
hard, cold, rigid, motionless. It has exhibited no
flexibility, no variety, no changes of expression, no
capacity to be moved by the softer influences. It
has been regulated, in theory indeed, upon princi-
ples of the strictest justice, but it has been the
justice not of instituting equal rights, but of main-
taining the rights of Original possession.
* It would seem as if modern China had recognised this social
want ; she appears latterly to have made an attempt towards the
establishment of virgin worship. See ‘Nouveau Journal Asiatique,”
p. 295. - -
90 Messages of the Old Religions.
If now we pass to the second of the great
Chinese systems—the creed of Lāo-tze—we shall
find that the national religion has again failed to
realise itself by seeking from a primitive age what
is not to be found there. The doctrine of Tāo-tze
is in the abstract a very lofty one, more lofty than
that of Confucius. It proposes to usher the human
soul into peace by the destruction of self-conscious-
ness, and in this respect it bears a striking resem-
blance to the great moral tenet of Christianity.
Indeed, Lào-tze is credited with having uttered a
maxim similar to that of Christ in the declaration
that the least shall be greatest. Yet just as Con-
fucianism, in its effort after a kingdom of heaven,
has failed where Christianity has succeeded, so the
doctrine of Lāo-tze, in its effort after the destruction
of self-consciousness, has also failed where Christi-
anity has succeeded. That it has failed is a matter
of historical certainty; the Chinaman is of all men
the least typical of Self-Sacrifice. The question is,
Why? And the answer is, Because Läo-tze, like
Confucius, has sought in a wrong quarter for the
realisation of his dream. He has gone back to the
most primitive type. He has proposed to destroy
self-consciousness by reducing man to the state of a
plant, by stemming the impulses of life and impos-
ing the conditions of an absolute stillness. Christi-
anity, like Lå0-tze, has proclaimed the necessity to
The Message of China. 91
salvation of an emptied self-consciousness, and the
proclamation has been followed by a signal success.
But why Because Christianity has pointed out a
source of self-forgetfulness exactly opposite to that
indicated by Lāo-tze, Lào-tze proposes to make
man unconscious by giving him less life; Christi-
anity, by giving him more. Lä0-tze would purchase
individual peace by suppressing the emotions of the
heart ; Christianity would bring peace to the heart
by giving it a new and an additional emotion. Lāo-
tze teaches that to impart stillness to the spirit, it
must cease to be ; Christ teaches that it can only
reach its stillness by being more abundantly. If
China would attain the goal of Christianity, it must
follow the method of Christianity; it must press
forward after having gone backward. No man
can attain spiritual unconsciousness by losing phy-
sical consciousness. Spiritual unconsciousness is
not death but life, and it is to be reached only by
the influx of a larger life. If the self-life is to be
extinguished, it must be not by going in but by
going out, by extending itself into the life of the
universe and identifying its own interests with the
interests of universal nature. Such a consumma-
tion can only be reached in the method opposite
to Lāo-tze—can only be attained by forgetting the
things which are behind, and pressing forward to
the things which are before. It is by transcending
92 Messages of the Old Religions.
, the life of the plant, by surpassing the life of the
animal, by leaving in the background, even the life
of the primitive man, and by entering into a life
which shall be in sympathy with universal de-
velopment, that humanity alone can hope to see
the day, when the dream of the Chinaman can
be realised.
The Message of India. 93
CHAPTER IV.
THE MESSAGE OF INDIA.
THE message of India | The expression seems almost
self-contradictory. If there is one thing which India
does not suggest, it is the proclamation of a single
message. It seems to exhibit rather a clash of
opposing voices striving for the mastery in the
temple of truth. It has been said that the soil of
Palestine unites within its compass the specimens of
every kind of plant. It may be said, with still more
accuracy, that the Soil of India unites within its
compass the specimens of every kind of Soul. There
is not a phase of religious thought which is not in-
tensely represented here; there is not an aspect of
philosophic speculation which does not find here a
congenial home. Here dwell the worshippers of
tradition—the men who place their reverence in
the outward letter of Scripture. Here repose the
mystics—the men who seek to lose themselves in a
light inaccessible and full of glory. Here rest the
followers of human reason—the men who claim to
94 Messages of the Old Religions.
take their sole guidance from experience. Here live
the materialists—the men who in the elements of
sense would recognise the origin of all things. Here
are the pioneers of reconciliation—the men who
would find a place where matter and spirit could
dwell side by side. Here, finally, are those in search
of a personal divine love—the men who look neither
to tradition, nor abstract mysticism, nor rationalism,
nor materialism, nor even to an attempt at the
reconciliation of all, but simply and solely to an
unveiling of that face of God in whose vision and
fruition the human spirit may find communion."
Nor, if we turn from the inward to the outward
life of the people, are we less impressed with the
variety in their types and characters. The moment
we have decided to assign a special quality to the
Indian race, there starts up an exception to the rule
so gigantic and so prominent as almost to nullify
it. When we look on one side we say, “This is a
nation of ascetics—of men who have abandoned all
interest in the world and its concerns; ” presently
we are confronted, on the very surface of her earliest
religious book, with the spectacle of a people in full
employment and enjoyment of most of the arts of
* These tendencies respectively indicate the names of the six
Indian schools—Mimansa, Vedanta, Nyaya, Vaiseshika, Sankhya,
Yoga. The most interesting Western account I know is Victor
Cousin, ‘Cours de l’Histoire de la Philosophie,’ 1827, vol. i. Also
see Professor Monier Williams’ ‘Indian Wisdom, pp. 48-154.
The Message of India. 95
life." When we turn in one direction we are im-
pressed with the belief that we are in a land of
dreamers; yet no nation in the world has ever ex-
hibited such a one - sided tendency towards the
practical, as appears in Buddhism. When we keep
our eye on a single point we are impelled to say,
“This is a religion of despair.” And yet when we
turn to the earliest records—to the very fountain-
head of the Indian faith—our judgment is immedi-
ately reversed. Here, as we shall see in the sequel,
all is hope; pessimism has no place within its
borders, and everything is gilded by the morning
sun. Amid such varieties of aspect and thought,
one is tempted to ask if there is any principle of
unity at all. Is it possible, in any sense, to regard
these contrary manifestations as parts of a single
whole 2 Is it possible to view such different pro-
ducts of the human mind as in reality the produce
of One Soil 3 Have we any right, in short, to speak
of the “religion of India” Has India one message
to the world ! Is there anywhere a connecting cord
between her diverging faiths 2 Is there to be found,
amid the apparent dissonance of her tendencies and
her Systems, one central, one comprehensive idea,
which binds together her seeming elements of con
flict, and blends her diverse colours in a rainbow's
form 2
* See Wilson’s ‘Rigveda,’ vol. i., re-edited by F. E. Hall, vols. ii.,
iii., iv., edited by E. B. Cowell. London : 1850-1866.
*º-
96 Messages of the Old Religions.
I believe that there is. I think it will be found
that the different phases of Indian thought are sus-
ceptible of union in one great idea, and that in this
union lies her message to the world. That idea is
human life. The message of India is the proclama-
tion of the pilgrim's progress—the earliest announce-
ment of the stages of that journey which has since
been traversed by myriads of souls. Here, for the
first time in history, we have a description of man's
spiritual road—a description of the path over which
the religious life is bound to travel if it would be
a complete and rounded life. One corner of the
earth is, as it were, Selected to be a mirror and a
miniature of the normal experience of each in-
dividual soul, and we are permitted to see within
the compass of a single nation that process of
religious evolution which has been the rule for all
nations and for all men.
What, then, are the stages of the spiritual life 2
It is a question of individual experience. It re-
quires for its answer no consultation of books or
authorities; one has only to look within. The edu.
cation of every completed life has passed through
three stages. The opening or initial stage is one of
hope. Its peculiarity consists in the fact that the
spectator of life underrates its difficulties. The first
impression of the youth in gazing upon this world
is not, as we should expect, an impression of fear.
He looks upon surrounding things with an eye al-
..p.
The Message of India. - 97
most of patronage. He is impressed with a sense
of the world's comparative smallness—of its small-
ness in comparison with his own mighty power. He
feels himself to be perfectly adequate, to be more
than adequate, to the task before him. The goal
towards which he is going shines with an illusory
clearness; the sense of distance is lost, and to-
morrow is already recognised as a portion of to-day.
By-and-by there comes a change. The relative
aspect of the world to himself is transformed ; it
becomes large and he becomes Small. He begins
to awake to the conviction that his first view of life
was an illusion. He finds that what he had ima-
gined to be only a mole-hill has become a mountain.
The waters which in fancy he had held in the hollow
of his hand expand into the dimensions of a vast
ocean; the isles which in imagination he had taken
up as a very little thing are found to be separated
from each other by almost interminable tracts of
sea. Originally his entire hope had rested in the
realisation of his worldly dream ; his only object
now is to awake from that dream. The present
system is illusory; if he would find reality, he must
rise above that system into a light and a life which
are now inaccessible. His daily course becomes a
straining after the invisible, his daily occupation a
search for things as yet not seen. The prize of
peace lies for him behind the veil, and the more
distant is the object from the day and hour, the
G.
98 Messages of the Old Religions.
more surely it becomes the hope of his rest. At last
this second stage also passes away, and a third and
final scene appears. The World, as a world, still
seems an object of illusion; but it is no longer to
the future that he looks for redemption from it.
Instead of straining his eyes into the invisible, he
begins to centre his gaze upon one corner—human-
ity. Instead of looking for peace to the advent of a
new order of things, he begins to look for it here
and now. He still believes that emancipation from
care can only be reached by , death ; but he finds
that death can itself be reached without leaving the
world. He finds that it is possible to lose himself in
the thought of others, to surrender his own person-
ality by entering into the personality of his brother-
man. He finds that he can get above the earth
without going out of it, that he can be redeemed
from the illusions of sense and time by being re-
deemed from the thought of self. He realises, in
short, the truth that loss of life comes from loving
it, and that the burden of individual care drops
from the arms of him who has entered into the life
of humanity.
Such in its completeness is the rhythm of all
human life. It has been the message of India to
foretell and foreshadow this rhythm. On a large
national scale she represents to us for the first time
these successive phases of the life of man. Det us
unfold them one by one. Let us begin with the
The Message of India. 99.
earliest phase known to us of Indian history. It
is that which appears in the Mantras" or Songs
of her first sacred book—the ‘Rig-Veda.’ It is
distinctively an age of hope. There is not a trace
of pessimism nor a note of despair. The worshipper
looks out upon this world with the eye and the
heart of a child. He sees in it a theatre made for
himself, and exactly suited to the part he is to
play. He is altogether unappalled by the majesty
of the surrounding scenery—although it is the same
scenery which afterwards appals him. The objects
before which he is in after-years to tremble are at
the beginning the sources of his freedom and his
power. He looks up to the forces of nature and
worships them, but he worships them rather as
allies than as despots. He makes them the object
of his prayers, but his prayers themselves are acts
of merchandise. He deals with the powers of na-
ture as a man in business deals with his brother-
craftsman. He offers them his adoration, and he
expects in return their sustenance. He gives them
his homage in order that he may receive from them
those balmy influences of wind and weather which
make life go smooth. His religious sacrifices are
from beginning to end a commercial transaction;
* As I wish to avoid all technical details, I refer for the meaning
of this word to Colebrooke, ‘Miscellaneous Essays,’ i. p. 308; Max
Müller, ‘Ancient Sanskrit Literature,” p. 343; and Goldstücker's
‘Pānini, p. 69. -
ſ
;
:
100 Messages of the Old Religions.
they are not the emptying of himself but the
lading of his ship; he gives something that he may
get more. All this indicates an over-estimate of
his own powers, an under-estimate of the powers of
nature. It indicates that at this stage he is a
totally different man from what he was afterwards
to become. So far from shrinking before the uni-
verse, he is not even adequately impressed with its
greatness; so far from feeling his own nothingness,
he has an overweening sense of his necessity to
the gods." He stands like Jacob under the stars
of heaven and strikes a bargain for his own profit,
promises his piety and his offerings if he shall have
bread to eat and raiment to put on.
I have said that at this stage the Indian worships
the powers of nature. I do not mean that he wor-
ships them as powers of nature. He looks up to
the dawn, to the meridian, to the setting, but he
sees in them more than the eye sees. They are
to him at this stage unconsciously what at an after-
stage they became consciously—the forms of divine
incarnations, the respective embodiments of distinct
celestial beings. These natural powers, indeed, are
nowhere equally worshipped at one time; each has
its own day, each has its season for empire. Can
we determine thé order of their separate reigns 2
* The spirit of Indian mythology is described by F. von Schlegel
as one of boundless enthusiasm (Philosophy of History, p. 154.
Lond., 1847).
The Message of India. || 0 |
Can we tell which of them took the precedence and
which followed 2 Historically we cannot do so, for
the simple reason that India has no history; her
past, present, and future are all represented on a
single chart, and we are called to determine their
sequence on other grounds than testimony, These
grounds must be internal. In the absence of his-
torical annals, we are driven within ourselves to
contemplate the Order of human thought. But
when we enter into this region, it seems to me
that we begin to get light even on the path of
history. If we take a simple survey of the Indian
chart, and consider only the natural and normal
movements of the universal human mind, I think
we shall arrive at a tolerably fair and an approxi-
mately accurate reckoning of the sequence and ar-
rangement of those steps by which the spirit of
that great nation has climbed to its culminating
worship.
I shall illustrate my meaning by comparison with
a very early document, as old as many of the
Vedas, and better known to the West than any of
them—the first chapter of the Book of Genesis.
Of course no one will imagine that I think there
is any connection between them except that con-
nection of human nature which it is my aim to
establish. But what I wish to remark is this. The
objects of creation selected in the first chapter of
Genesis are in a very peculiar sense identical with
102 Messages of the Old Religions.
those objects which are recognised in the Vedas as
worthy of religious reverence. Now, in the Book
of Genesis, these objects are presented to the view
not collectively but seriatim. They are made to
pass before us in a particular order. It has always
seemed to me that it is not an order of creation,
but an order of observation. I think the writer
had in his view, not the sequence of God’s working,
but the sequence of man's perception. The six
days of creation, to my mind are meant to unfold
those successive steps by which the eye of childhood
rises to the appreciation of the visible universe. If
this be the meaning, it would throw some light upon
the sequence of the corresponding objects in the
Vedas; for it would show that at a very early date
such a mode of thought was native to the Eastern
mind. But whether it be or be not a true exegesis,
it is certainly a true delineation. It is a fact of
experience that the child does arrive at the full
conception of nature by a process very similar to
that which is indicated in the order observed by
the six days’ creation. Let us look for a moment
at that sequence. -
When the infant opens its eyes upon this won-
drous world, the first object which awakens its
wonder is light. Light is to every individual man
the “offspring of heaven first-born.” It is the
earliest object of perception which meets his gaze.
I do not say it is his earliest sense of conscious-
The Message of India. * 103
ness; that probably begins with inward pain. But
it is the first thing which takes the child out of
himself, which tells him that there is another world
besides his own soul. You will observe, this earliest
outward sensation is light itself, pure and simple.
It is not yet light involving the idea of space.
Everything at first is touching the eye; there is
no sense of distance; there is nothing but glitter,
and the glitter is not recognised as anything separate
from the sight. This higher recognition only comes
with the second day. When the child puts forth
its hand to catch the light and finds that it eludes
its grasp, it awakens for the first time to the sense
of distance. Light ceases to be a mere glitter; it
becomes a firmament — a brilliant and boundless
expanse — overarching all things. As yet, these
things which it overarches are undiscerned ; the
perception of the diffused light precedes the per-
ception either of its own individual forms or of any
other forms. But with the third day there comes
this vision of individual things. There opens for
the child a season in which the dry land appears
with its variegated colours of vegetation, its fruits
and flowers and trees. Everything begins to be
seen “after its kind”—in its distinction from every
other thing; and the eye which has been at first
delighted only with the heavens, begins to revel in
the growing forms of earth. Then there breaks
upon the mind a new perception. The child wakens
104 Messages of the Old Religions.
to the recognition that there is a connection between
the earth and the heavens, that the sun rules the
day and the moon rules the night. It is at this
stage that it receives its impressions of the dread
of physical darkness. That children dread the dark
is proverbial; yet it is certainly not a primitive
instinct—it is the result of reflection. It can only
be reached when darkness ceases to be a mere fact
and becomes a symbol—the symbol of some guiding
hand withdrawn. Then for the first time begins to
dawn the interest in life as distinguished from the
interest in form. And the earliest interest in life
centres in the animal world. The child seeks the
first mirror of itself not in the face of its brother-
child, but in the impulses and the movements of
the lower creation; the horse and the dog excite
its wonder ere ever it has learned to wonder at its
own soul. The wonder at its own soul is the final
stage of all; it is the sixth day. With the dawn-
ing of this day it begins to awaken into the sense
of a human love, looks into a mother's face, and
experiences that earliest impression of trust in an-
other which is the portal into the Sabbath of rest.
Such is the Order of man's childhood, and we have
seen that it corresponds to the order of the Hebrew
visions of creation. If we apply it to the Pantheon
of India, we shall find that it will furnish at least a
possible theory of the relative times of her different
gods. Let us try to figure the process by which
The Message of India. 105
the Indian filled up that Pantheon. The Hindu
child, like the Hebrew child, opened his eyes on
the world of nature, and the first object which he
saw was Light; he called it Agni. It was as yet
to him what it is at first to every child—only a
thing which glitters. It was discerned simply as
a part of the eye, and was unconnected with any
sense of distance. The Indian child, like all other
children, would first learn its distance by the abor-
tive effort to touch it. When it found the light
to be something which eluded its grasp, it would
awaken into its second stage of worship. That
second stage was the adoration of Aditi — the
boundless firmament. Agni had been only the
glittering light ; Aditi was the light enthroned in
the heavens, the light diffused through immensity.
Then to the Indian, as to the Jew, there came a
third stage; the dry land appeared. The eye began
to rest upon solid masses, and to transfer its rever-
ence from the things of heaven to the things of
earth. Singularly enough, the first earthly thing
which received its reverence was plant-life. It is
at the stage subsequent to the worship of the
heavens that we find the Indian adoring the juice
of a vegetable product under the name of Soma."
Then the fourth day breaks. The Indian has adored
* This juice is offered up as a libation, and the offering indicates
a glimmering sense of something in man which needs expiation,
(Rig-Véda, Langlois' edition, i. 38.)
106 Messages of the Old Religions.
heaven and he has adored earth ; he is now to adore
the meeting of heaven and earth. It is here that
there come into view those forms and phenomena
of nature which mark the transition from the
celestial into the mundane. Here we find the
worship of what Herbert calls
{ % The bridal of the earth and sky;”
and the union of heaven and earth is celebrated
under the names of Dyaus and Prithivi. Here, in
the united adoration of Varuna and Mitra, we have
a reverential recognition of the truth that the
evening and the morning make for the world one
day. Here we have the reverence for things which
in themselves seem slight and insignificant, but
which receive a religious value as links between
the heavenly and the earthly. We have the wor-
ship of Ushas or the dawn—the point where the
golden sky begins to touch the hills. We have
the worship of the Suryas—or beams which the
sun bestows on the world. We have the worship
of Indra — the heat which breaks the cloud and .
sends rain. We have the worship of the Maruts
—those winds which bear to earth the messages of
heaven. Finally, we have the worship of Pushan
—the Sun as the guide of humanity, the light, no
longer merely in itself nor merely in its immensity,
but in its journey round the world to fulfil the
course of time, -
The Message of India. 107
The fifth morning breaks, and with it there comes
a higher worship still. There rises a deeper interest
in life. Hitherto the plant alone has been recog-
mised as a legitimate offering to heaven ; but with
this fifth morning we begin to witness the pheno-
menon of animal sacrifice." The gods begin to be
adored under an unwonted form. As yet the Indian
has only bowed before the powers of nature; here
he is seen to bow before the majesty of life. His
sense of the dignity of life takes the form of the
worship of Brahmanaspati—the name given to a
priest in the act of Sacrifice. The priest is not
worshipped as a man, nor in himself: in his private
moments he may be esteemed a very poor creature;
but in the act of sacrifice he is for the moment
sublime. And the sublimity is clearly a reflection
from the thing which he offers; it is the glory of
his gift which to the mind of the Indian makes the
priest worthy of reverence. The deification of the
Brahmanaspati indicates beyond all doubt that the
life of the animal creation is becoming to him an
object of increasing interest. To the Indian, as to
the Jew, one other stage remains: it is the recogni-
tion of the dignity of man. The sixth morning is
the grandest of all ; it is the adoration of Atman—
1 The rules for sacrifice are contained in those parts of the Vedas
called Brahmannas — evidently later than the earliest Mantras.
For the meaning of the word see J. Muir, in ‘Journal of Asiatic
Society’ for 1864, and introduction to M. Haug's edition of the
‘Aitaruya Brahmana, i, 4, -
108 Messages of the Old Religions.
the self or soul. Here the Indian has reached a
stage immeasurably beyond all the others. He had
worshipped the heavens in the forms of the light
and the firmament. He had worshipped the plant
in the form of the Soma. He had worshipped the
animal-sacrifice in the form of the Brahmanaspati.
But here he has taken a step beyond the firmament,
beyond the plant, beyond the animal; he has recog-
nised the dignity of mind. He has uncovered his
head to a new and higher principle—the principle
of mental life. He has entered within the gates
of a temple loftier and broader than the dome of
the starry heavens, and has bowed before the ideal
of the spirit of man.
Such appears to me to be at least a possible
scheme on which to explain the order of the Indian
Pantheon. It will doubtless be esteemed far-fetched
and fanciful. Far-fetched it is not, if it be derived
from so near a distance as human experience. Fanci-
ful it certainly is; but the early system of the Indian
Pantheon is itself fanciful, and demands fancy to
account for it. It is the product of poetry and
imagination, and by poetry and imagination must it
be explained. Of course I do not mean to imply
that the predominance of one object of worship
involved the exclusion of the others, nor that there
ever was a time in which one object was simul-
taneously predominant to all minds. It depended
entirely upon that state of development at which
The Message of India. I 09
the individual might have arrived ; one man might
be worshipping Agni, while another was adoring
Aditi. I have merely wished to express the fact
that, if we were permitted to trace the develop-
ment of any one complete Indian life, we would
find it to portray those stages which are described
on the opening page of the Hebrew records, and
to be in all probability in either case connected
with a natural law of human evolution.
But the main point on which I wish to insist in
the exhibition of this opening phase of Indian re-
ligion, is its pre-eminent and almost unqualified
hopefulness. There is not a trace of its future self,
not a hint of the coming despair. The Indian, like
the Hebrew seer, looks upon a world as yet unstained
by a fall, a world whose prevailing note is joy, and
which basks under the blessing of heaven. If the
|Hebrew evinces this by the constant averment, “God
saw that it was good,” the Indian not less strongly
reveals it by distributing successively his tributes of
reverence over every object of creation. And not
the least remarkable feature of his worship is the
fact that it includes even those objects of nature
which might be supposed to suggest an opposite
attitude. He is not afraid to take into his Pantheon
the stormy winds. To the natural eye the winds
suggest rather an irregularity than a harmony with
the law of nature. They convey to the untutored
mind the idea of a wilfulness which seeks to revolt
110 Messages of the Old Religions.
from the established order, and to set up a kingdom
of its own. The early Indian has an untutored mind,
but he has not fallen into this error. He has re-
fused to recognise in the seeming waywardness of
the winds anything inconsistent with the universal
harmony, and has insisted on giving them a place
in the great temple of his worship. Nor has he
scrupled to include the rains also. To an untutored
eye the rain is a blot on the beautiful; for the time
being it actually dims the face of the landscape,
and might be supposed to be a force with a counter-
acting and impeding aim. Yet the primitive Indian
has seen deeper. He has claimed for the rain an
agency harmonious with the beneficence of all
nature, and he has assigned a special divine work
to that power which causes it to fall. All this in a
primitive mind not guided by scientific knowledge
is clearly due to an optimistic tendency. It results,
and only can result, from a native and original hope-
fulness which starts upon the path of life with the
foregone conclusion that all is well. It is true that
here, as elsewhere, we have rites of sacrifice, and that
wherever sacrifice exists there exists an evidence of
not absolutely unclouded sunshine. Yet even the
sacrifices of the Indian bear witness to the optimism
of his early faith ; for the object which he offers
is itself deified, and the priest who surrenders it is
himself invested with the attributes of divinity.
The very hour of humiliation has been lifted into
The Message of India. 111
the Hindu Pantheon, and the act which maturally
marks the sense of human degradation has been
transformed by this early worship into an element
of man's greatness.
The truth is, it would almost seem as if the first
mission of India to the world was to proclaim the
original hopefulness of the message of life. With
all those geographical surroundings which naturally
foster gloom, and which ultimately did foster gloom,
the spirit of this race was at the outset light and
airy, incapable of being depressed, and unable to be
sombre. It became in this a revelation to the world
of what the dawn of life by nature is, and by nature
ought to be. Indeed, the conception of a pessimistic
child is in itself a contradiction in terms. Child-
hood is the season of outlook, and where childhood
is unimpeded the Outlook is ever One of brightness.
I say, where childhood is unimpeded. There is such
a thing as a melancholy childhood; but where it
exists it is always the result of Some hereditary
influence. India betrays no such influence; its
morning is without clouds. If there is anything
which would prompt me to assign to this faith
an earlier origin than to others, it is just this
original cloudlessness, this absence from the morning
sky of all portents and of all shadows. It would
seem to indicate that, in a deeper sense than the
surrounding religions, the worship of India was the
Cradle of all worship. Nowhere is there so much
112 Messages of the Old Religions.
freshness, even in the incipient stages of seemingly
contemporaneous faiths. China, with all her hopes
of empire, exhibits the traces of a life worn out by a
long course of worldliness. Persia, in spite of her
struggles and aspirations—nay, by the very struggle
to realise her aspirations—gives evidence that her
morning sky has long departed. Egypt, by her
efforts from the very outset to pierce behind the
veil of sense, bears testimony to the fact that
the form of her faith is a comparatively late one,
and one which could only come when the first age
of life had been found illusory. But India is at
the beginning a spontaneous child. She reveals in
every movement the primitive instincts of the heart.
She comes to the sight of nature without any trace
of a theory, without any indication that she has
received from others a Creed to promulgate or a
doctrine to defend. She paints only what she
sees, and she paints it as if she had seen it for the
first time. There are many things in the Vedas
which do not suggest a primitive religion; there
is a knowledge of the arts which implies a previous
growth, and there is a subtlety of speculation which
indicates a previous maturing. But the optimism of
their first aspirings comes to us as at least one drop
from the fountain, and the uncloudedness of their
original view looks like the reflection of a dawn.
The Message of India. 113
CHAPTER W.
THE SUBJECT CONTINUED,
I HAVE said that the message of Indian religion
has been the revelation of life. I have pointed
out that, as a matter of fact, the spiritual life of
the individual man is unfolded in three stages.
There is a stage of initial hopefulness, in which
the world looks absolutely cloudless; there is a
stage of disenchantment, in which the world reveals
nothing but clouds, and in which the soul's only
hope is to rise beyond it; and there is a stage
of moral action, in which the Soul surmounts
once more its sense of care, not by rising above
the world, but by finding within the world itself an
object transcending materialism—the brotherhood of
Illáll]. -
I have in the previous chapter endeavoured to
show how the earliest manifestation of Indian
religion has revealed the earliest of these phases
of life. We have seen how the first impressions
of the Hindu mind were almost unqualifiedly
II
ll 4 Messages of the Old Religions.
joyful—how it looked out upon the forms of na-
ture and saw in them only the mirror of its own
freedom. We are now to let the curtain fall upon
this opening scene, and when it shall rise again we
shall be in the presence of a complete transforma-
tion. If the first stage of Indian religion is a sense
of perfect freedom, the second is assuredly a sense
of entire bondage. We have no historical clue by
which to interpret the change; the interpretation
lies behind the scenes. We have simply the succes-
sive representation of two contrasted pictures—the
picture of national hope and the picture of national
despair. In the absence of any outward clue we
are driven inward. In the silence of historical
annals we seek an explanation from the voice of
human nature. We ask if there is anything in the
constitution of the mind of man which can render
intelligible this marked and contrasted transition,
which can explain the substitution of a dark and
sombre view of the universe for a view whose
characteristic feature was sweetness and light?
More than one attempt has been made to furnish
such an explanation, and some of the theories seem
to me not wholly satisfactory. One very popular
reason is the theory whose representative advocate
is perhaps Mr Buckle. It seeks to account for the
general depression of the Eastern mind by purely
geographical influences. It tells us that in Europe
man has power over nature, whereas in Asia nature
\ ~ * . - * • *
The Message of India, . 115
has power over man." It tells us that the Indian
has been frightened by his vast mountains, appalled
by his endless plains, dwarfed by his immense rivers;
that his personality has been compelled to shrink
into insignificance before the majesty of a natural
creation exhibited ever on the largest scale, and
that his life has trembled into nothingness in the
presence of material forces which he is powerless
to control and unable to comprehend. Now, I have
already admitted that these geographical influences
do exert a depressing influence, or, as I have ex-
pressed it, they “naturally foster gloom "; but I
have used that expression advisedly, in order to
guard against the notion that they can create gloom.
..When once the heart has been depressed, an envi-
ronment such as that of India will certainly tend to
retain and even to deepen its depression ; but there
is nothing in Such surroundings which can originate
the sinking of the heart. If a man enters upon such
a scene with a disposition light and buoyant, he will
find nothing in these elements to interfere with this
lightness and buoyancy—probably much which shall
minister to them. The vastness of the American
continent has been made, in Longfellow’s “Evangel-
ine,” to suggest to the individual mind the idea of
melancholy. But such a suggestion belongs not to
the morning of American history; it has proceeded
See Buckle's ‘History of English Civilisation, vol. i., introduc.
‘tory pages. - -
116 Messages of the Old Religions.
from an age which is already weighted with caré
and oppressed with the burden and heat of the day.
To the original settlers in New England, the vast-
ness of the Transatlantic continent conveyed a very
different impression; it stimulated into enthusiastic
hope the hearts of the Pilgrim Fathers. But perhaps
the most remarkable instance is that of India her-
self. We have seen that her morning was all bright-
ness. Throughout that morning, even from the
dawn, she dwelt in the same environment that sub-
Sequently evoked her spirit of gloom. She was sur-
rounded by the same gigantic aspects of nature and
the same vast scale of scenery; yet in these hours of
morning she did not shrink before the spectacle, nor
feel small in the presence of material greatness.
|How shall we account for this 2 It is true that
many of her people had originally been trans-
planted from another soil; shall we say that her
early hopefulness was only the expenditure of that
former life, only the survival of a culture which
the gloom of the new environment could not at
once wear away ? Such a theory is precluded by
the facts. There would be some force in it if the
period of India's youth had been of short duration;
it might then, indeed, have seemed like the expiring
gleam of a fire elsewhere lighted. But the period
of India's youth is long, unwontedly long; it must
be measured not by years but centuries. The proof
lies in the fact that her carliest books reveal a civi-
The Message of India. 117
lisation that could not have sprung up in a night,
and an acquaintance with the arts of life that de-
manded a lengthened past. The power, therefore,
which conferred this primitive brightness on the
Indian mind could not have been a foreign power;
it must have been indigenous to the soil. It was
capable of subsisting during a very long minority in
the midst of these same geographical influences
which are supposed to have produced its contrary;
and the conclusion seems inevitably to follow, that.
the effect attributed to these inſluences lias been
due to some other cause.
The truth is, we habitually overrate the Origina-
tive influence of nature upon mind. Nature is both
a fountain and a mirror; but it is far more a mirror
than a fountain. It does not give nearly So much
as it gets. We talk in popular language of receiving
our impressions from surrounding scenery; in real-
ity, we first give our impressions to the Scenery and
then take them back again. Our moods of mind are
rarely created by nature; they are almost always
imparted to nature and restored to us anew. The
visible creation dances to our piping and mourns to
our lamenting; it laughs when we are joyful, it
wccps when wo are Sad. If the Indian enters npon
the scene with ideas of freedom in his heart, he
will find these ideas mirrored in everything around
him—expressed in the endless plains and typified
in the gigantic mountains. If the Indian should
118 Messages of the Old Religions.
come to the scene with a mind overwhelmed by a
sense of its own impotence, he will find the impres-
sion confirmed by the very same aspects of nature;
the boundless length of the plain will repeat to him
the contrast of his own nothingness, and the tower-
ing strength of the mountain will remind him of his
insignificance anew. . .
We must arrive, then, at the conclusion that the
change in the Indian mind from gay to grave is not
to be accounted for on geographical principles. A
Second attempt to account for it has been made from
an opposite direction. It has been sought to ex-
plain it not from the world without but from the
world within. We have been told that the shrinking
of the Indian before the aspects of nature has been
due to the natural inactivity of his intellect, to that
want of mental energy which characterises the East
in general and marks the Hindu race in particular.
Now, no one would attempt to deny that from a
Western point of view the Indian intellect is dis-
tinguished by its want of energy. But what do we
mean by this 2 Simply that it is distinguished by
its absence from that direction where in the West
it is accustomed to blow. The manifestations of
the Western mind are energetic in a practical direc-
tion; they exhibit themselves by their effects on the
outer world. In India there is not this form of
energy; but there is another and a more intense
form. The mind here does not go out, but it does
The Message of India. . ſt 19
not therefore fall asleep; it goes in. It retires
within itself and meditates upon the Secret of its
-own nature. We are accustomed to think and speak
of the Indian mind as an inert and sluggish thing.
It is characteristically and emphatically the reverse.
A man is not necessarily asleep because he is not
outwardly moving. It is not too much to say that
the mind of the West, with all its undoubted im-
pulses towards the progress of humanity, has never
exhibited such an intense amount of intellectual
force as is to be found in the religious speculations
of India. Nay, I will go further. It is not too
much to say that the religious speculations of India
have been the cradle of all Western speculations, and
that wheresoever the European mind has risen into
heights of philosophy, it has done so because the
Brahman has been its pioneer There is no intellec-
tual problem of the West which had not its earliest
discussion in the East, and there is no modern solu-
tion of that problem which will not be found antici-
pated in Eastern lore. We must emphatically deny,
therefore, that the Hindu mind is in any sense dis-
tinguished by the absence of force or energy. If
I were asked to mark its distinction from the
European intellect, I should say that it is the
• * *
* Even those who admit that the second period of Indian history
is a retrogression from the first, do not deny that it exhibits signs
of mental progress—e.g., Ritter, ‘History of Ancient Philosophy,’
i. 94, - - - - - - - . .
.
*
:
120 Messages of the Old Religions.
difference between bearing and doing. The Euro-
pean energy is exerted in the construction of new
masses; the Indian force is exhibited in the Sup-
porting of old ones. The weight of this world
presses upon the mind of the Hindu. His main
desire is to shake it off, to get free from it, to
emancipate his inner self from the trammels of the
outer day; and all the struggles of his life are
directed towards this end. The fact of such an
end is the disproof of anything abject or craven
in his intellectual nature; and the struggle by
which he seeks to compass it, subterranean and
unseen as it is, exhibits a larger amount of actual
power than can be witnessed in all the utilitarian
movements of Western civilisation.
The question, then, still remains unanswered, How
are we to account for the change of the Indian mind
from optimism into despair? It cannot be explained
by scenery, it cannot be referred to the inertness of
the understanding; is there any other possible solu-
tion ? There is ; but it is one that lies not in the
nature of India but in the nature of man. The
searchers after causes have, in my opinion, looked
too far in advance for an explanation of this
problem. If they had looked into the glass of
human nature, they would have found that India
is here in no sense peculiar; it simply exhibits,
in very pronounced and Eastern letters, the hand-
writing on the walls of all humanity. The transi-
The Message of India. 121
tion of the Indian mind from gay to grave is itself
a revelation of the message of life, an anticipative
specimen of what every developed man and every
developed nation does and must go through. What
are the facts of the case ? The beginning of all life
is a search for individual happiness. By individual
happiness I do not mean personal happiness; a joy
which is not personal is a contradiction in terms.
. But the search for an individual joy is the pursuit
of an object with a view to my own advantage, and
to that alone. It is with this pursuit that all life
begins. We start upon the course of our being with
the firm conviction that each of us is an end to
himself. We look upon the world as made specially
for ourselves, and we expect with the utmost con-
fidence that everything around us will minister to
our pleasure. And in every case we experience a
bitter disappointment. There are some instances
in which the fortunes of life are unequally bestowed;
but here the same lot falls impartially to all. There
is not a man in this world who has not come to the
conviction that his first conception of existence was
a dream, who has not arrived at the knowledge that
things were not created to minister to his own
individual happiness, And as his own individual
happiness is at first the only kind of joy he knows,
the advent of this knowledge comes to him as more
than a pain—as a despair. As the conviction breaks
upon him that the first hope was a delusion, and
122 Messages of the Old Religions.
as the light of a higher hope has not yet dawned,
the impression created by the discovery must be
one of blank pessimism. It was so with India. She
began with the belief that the universe existed for
the sake of the individual; she reverenced the
powers of nature as ministers to the wants of man.
She valued Agni not so much because it was light
as because it brought light to some particular path
of life; she worshipped Indra not so much because
it was itself a source of refreshment, as because it
sent rain at some specially needed time to the crops
of some special man. This was her first conception
of the value of nature, and it proved a delusion.
She found that whatever value Agni had, it was
not this value; that whatever advantage lay in the
worship of Indra, it was not this advantage. She
found that to the individual man Agni often failed
to send his light just at the moment when it was
wanted; that Indra often refused to give the shower
precisely at the time and place where it was speci-
ally desired. And in the breaking of that conviction
there happened to India what befalls every man—
an aggravated Sense of the illusion life has given.
Disappointed in her first expectation, she, like the
rest of mankind, invested the whole world with the
gloom of its transition moment. Her earliest hope
had been a dream; she revenged herself by saying
it was all a dream. The world in its length and
breadth presented itself to her view as a scene of
The Message of India. 123
vanity and vexation of spirit, as an agglomeration
of vain shadows, meaning nothing and tending no-
where. It stood before her as an illusion, a dream,
an assemblage of phantasies, already detected as
impostures, yet, by their vivid appearance of reality,
impressing the mind with a sense of care. Hence-
forth the problem of India became one reiterated
question—how to get free. How was she to emanci-
pate herself from those deluding shadows 2 How
was she to get rid of those illusory cares of the
sense which clogged the wings of the spirit 2 How
was she to be lifted from this grovelling in the dust
into an atmosphere congenial to the life of the soul
and harmonious with the instincts of the heart 2
At this stage of her history it appeared to the
Indian mind as if the only chance of emancipation
were material disembodiment. To rise above the
world seemed impossible, except by rising above
the things of the world. How was this elevation
to be effected Ž It is quite a common thing for
men who are passing through this Indian experi-
ence, to attempt an emancipation from the things
of time by contemplating the hour of death. But
the men who do so are actuated by the notion
that the things of time are now realities. The
Indian mind had arrived at a contrary belief. It
was not simply that she believed there was a time
coming when these visible things would pass away;
she did not believe them to exist now. There was
2124 Messages of the Old Religions.
no use to wait for death to find emancipation from
them; they were at the present moment matters
of mere imagination, and therefore there must be
out of them some present mode of exit. What
was that mode 2 The attempt to answer this
question is the birth of Indian philosophy—a
philosophy which directly or indirectly has domin-
ated the whole course of human speculation. It
is the transition from the hymns of the ‘Rig-Veda”
into the creed called Brahmanism—a creed which,
dating almost from the dawn of history, has been
unsurpassed in intellectual subtlety by all the sub-
sequent efforts of the mind of man. Even at this
remote date it does not appear an anachronism.
It belongs as much to the nineteenth century after
the Christian era as to the ninth century before
it, and the student of modern times, in pondering
its abstruse speculations, feels that he is breathing
an atmosphere not alien to that which has come
from the Spirit of the German renaissance.
These efforts of the Indian mind to emancipate
itself from the shadows of time will be found speci-
ally embodied in those philosophic works called the
‘Upanishads,’"–a word which probably means “that
which lies beneath the surface.” Into any technical
account of these speculations it is neither my inten-
! See Professor Max Müller's ‘History of Ancient Sanskrit Litera-
ture (London, 1860); also John-Muir's ‘Original Sanskrit Texts,’
vol. i.-iv. (London, 1858-1863). - -
The Message of India. 125.
tion nor my province to enter. I wish merely to
photograph the leading features of the system, and
to put them in a light which shall be intelligible
to the English mind. I shall avoid all technical
language, and shall endeavour, by an attempt at
lucid exposition, to make clear a subject which
the grotesqueness of mythological terms has in-
vested with a mist beyond its natural mysticism.
Brahmanism, which we have characterised as the
second stage in the life of India, is the effort through
despair of the world to fly from the world. But the
Brahman may say, like the Psalmist in a different
sense, “Whither shall I flee from Thy presence 2"
The world is to him an assemblage of shadows—a
dream; but for that very reason it seems to present
no refuge. What advantage can he get by fleeing
from one shadow to another ? Must not all his
efforts be only a flight from illusion to illusion ?
Yet, as he meditates on this dark prospect, there
comes to him a startling thought. He says, This
world is indeed a dream; but if so, must there not
be a dreamer ? Does not the very fact of illusion
imply the presence of one who is subject to illusion ?
Conceding that all the phenomena of the universe
are phenomena of a dream-sleep, who is the sleeper,
and who is the dreamer ? Whoever he is, he must
lie beneath the shadows, must be independent of
the shadows, and must therefore be an ultimate
refuge from the shadows. * , , ,
126 Messages of the Old Religions,
And the Brahman answers, The dreamer is God
Almighty. If the world to him be an assemblage
of shadows, it is not therefore an assemblage of .
sleepers. All the images of the universe, images as
they are of the night, yet pass through the experi-
ence of a single soul—the Divine Soul. There are
not two dreamers, but only one — the Absolute
Spirit. The appearance of a multitude results from
the fact that the one consciousness is presented in
fragments. If a vase falls from a height, it will be
broken into a hundred pieces; yet even in their
brokenness these pieces will reveal not two vases
but one. When the sun breaks upon various sheets
of water, we have a better simile still of the
Brahman's creed. A thousand Suns are then pre-
sented to the eye, revealing not fragments, like the
shattered vase, but the entire rounded image of the
object. Yet all the time the plurality is an illusion.
There are not a thousand Suns, but only one—the
original one in the heavens. The nine hundred and
that is to say,
exist only in the consciousness. The life that was
a unity in the heavens, when it passes into the
earth takes the form of diversity; the one becomes
ninety-nine exist only in the eye
the many." t
Let us try to illustrate the point by yet another
1 The pantheism of the Brahmanic creed will be well seen from
a Upanishad of the fourth Veda, given by Colébrooke, ‘Asiatic
Researches, viii. 475.
The Message of India. 127
simile, which will bring the picture nearer than
either of the two preceding. Let us imagine a fire
lighted at the end of a room in which there are
a hundred mirrors. Every one of these mirrors will
reveal a separate fire. In this case there will be
not merely, as with the sun on the sheets of water,
a complete image of various objects, but these
various objects will all be visible at one and the
same moment. Nevertheless, here, as in the case
of the images of sunlight, we are in the presence of
only one reality—the originally lighted fire. The
others are all illusions, and if we could imagine
them gifted with intelligence, they would recognise
themselves to be illusions. Each of them would
say: “I am not the fire on the mirror, as you sup-
pose; I am the fire at the end of the room. In
myself I am nothing; my whole personality is the
personality of this original fire. If you were to put
out this fire, I would be nowhere, for I am nowhere
even now except in so far as I reflect and image
this primal light.”
This metaphor seems to me to express exactly the
doctrine of Brahmanism regarding God's relation to
the world, with the single exception of the fact that
in the doctrine of Brahmanism the mirror itself
would be an illusion. The mirror here must be
regarded as the dream—the canvas of fancy on
which are painted the images of the night of time.
You will observe that to the mind of the Indian the
I28 Messages of the Old Religions.
mirrors are the disturbing things. There are recog-
mised by him three stages in the life of the Divine
Spirit. The first stage is that in which the fire
burns alone in the room, without any object to
reflect it ; it is the period in which the Divine
Spirit enjoys rest unbroken by a dream. When
the Indian thinks of God in this light he calls Him
|Brahma. The second is that in which the divine
rest is broken and the dream begins. It is the stage
when the mirrors are introduced into the apartment,
and when, by their deceitful reflection, the one fire
appears to be the many. When the Indian thinks
of God in this light he calls Him Vishnu. The third
is that in which the dream vanishes again and the
unbroken rest returns. It is the stage in which
the mirrors are removed, in which the illusion of
the many lights disappears, and the original fire
resumes once more its solitary and undivided em-
pire. When the Indian thinks of God in this light
he calls Him Siva.
Now, it is to Siva that in the mind of the Brah-
man the main interest attaches. The word literally
means the “destroyer.” He belongs to the stage
where the mirrors are annihilated, where the dream
of life vanishes, and where the imaginary lights go
back into the real and primal light. The worship
of a destroyer seems a startling thing, appears to
* They are not stages of development; the third is only the first
restored, after an imaginary interruption. -
The Message of India. 129
be something anomalous in the history of religion.
It is not really so; it is the second stage in the
message of life. Nearly every man experiences at
one time what the Brahman has experienced and
photographed, What is that destroyer whom the
Brahman worships ? It is the destroyer of shams,
of illusions, of dreams. The destruction he craves
is the destruction of things which to him have no
existence except in imagination ; in other words, it
is the destroying of vain fancies. He wants to get
his mind emancipated from illusions. He feels that
the things of Sense and time, shadows as they are,
are yet shadows which eclipse from the sight the
realities of being, and he longs for the rising of a
sun which shall dispel even their semblance of exist-
ence." This is what every life experiences in its
second stage — the stage in which its primitive
hope has faded into despair. The moment we
find that life has failed to fulfil its early pro-
mises, we seek refuge in the belief that the things
we desired were only shadows. Our greatest com-
fort lies in contemplating their unsubstantiality,
and in looking to a state of things where they
shall have no existence even in thought. At these
times we all worship the destroyer; our view of
eternity is itself that of a destroyer, of something
* The attitude of the Brahman towards the world is finely
portrayed by Max Müller, ‘Ancient Sanskrit Literature,’ p. 18
and sequel.
130 Messages of the Old Religions.
that shall rend in tatters our webs of Sophistry.
Let no one imagine that this aspiration of the
Brahman has nothing in common with Christianity.
It presents, on the contrary, one of the main links.
by which a Christian missionary might connect the
* . . . . . . .
When we sing in our churches every Sunday those
words of Keble,
“Till, in the ocean of Thy love,
We lose ourselves in heaven above,”
are we breathing any other aspiration than that
which, in somewhat fantastic form, is expressed in
the creed of Brahmanism 2 When We chant in our
worship the prayer of Toplady, 4. - *
“Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in Thee,”
what else are we doing but re-echoing the old Indian
desire to be liberated from our past and from our *
present by the entrance into a life which shall dis-
sipate their shadows? This mysticism, as we call it,
belongs to no special faith; it belongs to human
nature. I do not say it belongs to human nature
at every stage of its being; I believe that it is
not the ripeness nor the fulness of the life of man.
But it is assuredly the product of life's second period
—its period of disenchantment. It comes ever with
that time when the soul awakens to the sense that
The Message of India. . 131
what it believed to be a substance was only a
shadow. In the first discovery of the illusoriness of
the things of time, the impulse of the human spirit is
always to break away from time, and to seek a refuge
in something which transcends the visible; its im-
mediate voice is the cry of the Psalmist, “Oh that:
I had wings like a dove for then would I fly away,
and be at rest.” - . . . . . . . .
... How, then, is this dream to be broken 2 How:
is the mind to be emancipated from the belief in
these shadows 2 We often in the visions of the
night recognise a dream to be a dream without
being able to shake it off; we have an impression
that we are not awake, and yet we cannot tell in
what respect the waking consciousness ought to
differ from the illusion which besets us. How is
the Brahman to get rid of his illusion ? He answers
that in order to get rid of it he must cease to love
it. That which in the view of Brahmanism tends
to perpetuate the dream is the fact that the dream,
in spite of its recognised illusoriness, is with the
large mass of men an object of affection; they
cling to the shadows even while they feel their
shadowiness. Now, whatever we love tends to per-
sist in the mind; even if form away by violence,
it returns to our thought with redoubled power.
The Brahman had no hope whatever of getting
emancipated from the dream by the mere fact of
death. It was his opinion that if a man died with
132 Messages of the Old Religions.
his heart fixed on the things of Sense, the things of
sense would come back to him again; in other
words, that he would repeat his old life in a new
form. This is the root of that doctrine which has
been so fruitful of results in so many forms of faith
—the transmigration of the Soul. It is founded
upon the Indian belief that there is a congruity
between the body and the mind, a congruity which
mere change of space cannot alter, and which death
itself does not of necessity annul. If a man has left
this world with a strong leaning towards animal
impulses, he will in due time be born into this
world again in a body corresponding to these animal
impulses—perhaps even in an animal body. There
is a principle of attraction between body and soul
which stretches beyond the grave, and which tends
to reincarnate the Soul in an environment and in
circumstances similar to its former self. The deeds
which we do in the body are helping to mould the
body, and the mould of the body shall determine
the future home of the spirit. This retributive
power of action, this tendency of bodily deeds to
form a tabernacle for the man after death, is what
the Indian called Karma. It answers more nearly
to our modern idea of heredity than to any other
conception. It is the reappearance in an after-age
of seeds which have been sown by us in this, and its
only difference from hereditary transmission consists
in the fact that the seeds reappear not merely to the
The Message of India. 133
eye of posterity, but to the sight and to the experi-
ence of the man who sowed them.
In the religion of India, as in Christianity, a man
has a judgment-seat after death; he must render
an account of the things done in the body. But
the account which the man renders in the religion
of India consists not in bearing a penalty in some
future state, but in getting back to the state from
which death has outwardly severed him. His pun-
ishment lies in being obliged to retrace his steps
into an environment corresponding in all essential
respects to that which he formerly inhabiteds If
he leaves the world with the world in his heart, the
world in his heart will bring him back again to
scenes and situations which shall simply repeat the
experience of bygone days, and clothe him anew in
that form of vesture from which death ought to have
set him free. The retributive power of Karma lies
in the congruity between a man's body and a man’s
soul. The house in which the spirit dwells is a
house not made with hands but with desires. The
wish is not only the father of the thought, but the
source of the embodiment; where a man's heart is,
his tabernacle shall be also. The first and foremost
thing is to remove and to improve fle wish. If the
soul would escape transmigration at the hour of
death into a body and a life repeating the shad-
ows of to-day, it must begin to-day by turning its
thoughts from these shadows. It must set its affec-
134 Messages of the Old Religions.
tions already on the things above. It must tear up
by the roots its propensity to live in the temporal,
and must plant in its room a love for the unseen
and eternal. Such a love will be more effectual
than death in separating the man from his environ-
ment of clay. It will interpose a stronger barrier
than the grave to the reappearance of his old con-
ditions, and will usher him, even while on earth,
into a life from which these conditions are ex-
cluded. The man who longs for eternity has parted
already from the body of time.
In connection with this subject there is a point
in the Indian religion which has often struck me as
very peculiar: I allude to the institution of caste.
Does it not seem a strange thing that the doctrine
of caste should have found its origin and its most
favoured home precisely in that region where men
had decided to abandon the world 2 Would we not
expect that a race which had awakened to a sense
of the nothingness of time would have ignored
above , all things those petty distinctions of rank
which tend to perpetuate temporal conditions
The superiority of man to man is supposed to have
its origin in the desires of the flesh; why does a
religion, whose leading aim is to obliterate these
desires, place in the very foreground of its system
a gradation of human ranks whose summit touches
the heavens and whose base is on the ground 2
Such was the difficulty which often presented
The Message of India. 135
itself to my own mind in contemplating the spirit of
Brahmanism. On a deeper reflection, however, I.
came to the conclusion that even in its doctrine of
caste, Brahmanism is not inconsistent with itself.
It is true that in this doctrine it does recognise, in
very pronounced terms, the superiority of man to
man. But what is the ground of that superiority ?
It is the comparative amount of unworldliness. I
do not say that this idea persisted through the
history of caste, but I do believe that it existed at
its origin, and was the immediate cause of its for-
mation. Look at the four castes of India, and you
will see, if I mistake not, that they are regulated by
their relative degree of superiority to the things of
time. At the top of the social ladder stands the
priest. He stands there because in all ages priest-
hood has been the special type of sacrifice. That
the priest has ever perfectly realised that type can-
not be affirmed of any religion, least of all of the
religion of India. But this does not by one iota
alter the fact that the ideal of priesthood is sacrifice.
The man who stands at the altar is by profession
the representative of the highest form of self-sur-
render. He typifies the place and the hour in which
humanity resigns its delight in all worldly things,
and sets its affections on the things above. There-
fore it is that the Brahman has placed him at the
head of the social ladder. He has been made first
in the world precisely because he is supposed to
136 Messages of the Old Feligions.
have given up the world altogether; it is the pre-
eminence of social extinction. Then, a step lower
down, stands the soldier. His is also by definition
a sacrificial life. That in point of fact it has been
often the reverse of sacrificial is indisputable; it has
been frequently the most oppressive of all forces.
Yet this is contrary to its ideal. The ideal of the
Soldier is that of a man who has lost his person-
ality in the life of his country, who has given up his
individual desires for a national motive, and who
has become animated by one spirit which has dis-
placed every private will—the spirit of patriotism.
Therefore he stands in the second rank amongst the
castes of India, yielding only to the priest in the
order of his pre-eminence. Yet with him, as with
the priest, the Order of pre-eminence is a sacrificial
order. He stands at the top of the ladder because
he has less personality than those below, and he
owes his superiority to the belief that he has made
a more full surrender of his individual independence.
We take a step further down still, and we come
to the third caste—that of the agriculturist or man
of commerce. He is, from an Indian point of view,
decidedly below either the priest or the soldier.
His profession is by nature less sacrificial; it does
not of necessity involve the giving up of himself
for others. It is possible in such a life as his to
make his own interest the sole motive of his living.
Nevertheless, he does not stand at the foot of the
The Message of India. I 37
ladder. With all his temptations to selfishness, he
may still be unselfish. He may realise the fact
that the life of commerce is, after all, not for the
individual but for the community—that it is based
upon the very idea of an interchange of wants,
whereby a man gives to his brother what his brother
needs, in return for receiving what he himself re-
quires. In the very practice of agriculture he may
recognise the symbol of a sacrificial life, in which
the seed comes to the surface only because it has
been buried, and he may be stimulated by that
symbol to go and do likewise. Therefore it is that
even for him there is reserved a place higher than
the lowest—a place which touches, indeed, the bor-
ders of the worldly, but which yet lies intermediate
between the secular and the sacred. He is a step
below the heavens, yet a step above the earth.
The lowest place is reserved for the fourth order–
that of the slave. The serf occupies in the religion
of India the most subordinate position in sacred as
well as in Secular things. Yet I am by no means of
Opinion that he has been assigned this subordinate
position in religion by reason of his lowly condition
of life. It is not because he is a slave that he
holds the lowest place amongst the privileges of
the worshipper, but because, being a slave, he has
not the opportunity of yielding up a voluntary
sacrifice. It is not the fact of his dependence that
places him on that step of the religious ladder which
138 Messages of the Old Religions.
is nearest to the ground. Dependence, in the view
of the Brahman, so far from being a thing to be
despised, is a thing to be sought and venerated.
The goal of all life, the ultimate aim of all exist-
ence, is that the individual should surrender him.
self to the sway of the Universal Will—that man
should lose himself in God. But the difference
between the surrender of the devotee to God and
the surrender of the slave to his earthly master, is
that in the one case the act is voluntary, in the
other obligatory. The slave gives up his life to
his master because he is compelled to do so; he is
not under grace but under the law. It is this which
puts him, in the view of the Brahman, lower than
the priest, lower than the soldier, lower even than
the merchant. He is not his own master. He is
in the strictest sense a mere individual unit, im-
pelled to act from motives of private interest. He is
dominated every moment by the sense of fear. His
action never passes beyond himself, never contem-
plates its effect on humanity. It is done purely
as a source of self-preservation, and in the preserva-
tion of his individual self its purpose ends. There-
fore to this fourth order of the body politic there
is assigned the lowest place on the social ladder.
He stands at the very base because his life does not
transcend the earth, and his aspirations do not reach
above the ground. He is a child of the Soil, a
creature of the dust, a denizen of the day and hour;
The Message of India. 139
and therefore there is given to him a place on a
level with the dust and an order commensurate
with the hour.' . + *
Such is, in my view, the mental origin of the idea
of caste as exhibited in India. It is only as an
origin that I propose it. It is certainly no longer
the Indian motive for its own social order; that
motive has long since become worldly. But origin-
ally it was not worldly. In that period of transition
in which the Indian mind woke up from its dream
that this earth was an elysium, it passed firmly and
instantaneously to the opposite extreme. It came
to regard this world not as a paradise but as a
hindrance to paradise—as an illusion, a dream, a
clog on the aspirations of the spirit. It was at this
period of worldly pessimism that the idea of caste
arose, and surely its rise must be interpreted in
accordance with the age which produced it. Is
it probable, is it conceivable, that at the very
moment in which India proclaimed the despair of
earthly life, she should have inaugurated a system
intended to propagate earthly vanities? Is it likely
that caste could have meant to her the superiority
of one man to another at a time when she had
reached a conviction of the nothingness of all
* The best account of these four orders of caste will be found in
the first volume of Dr John Muir's ‘Original Sanskrit Texts on the
Origin and Progress of the Religion and Institutions of India, col-
lected, translated into English, and illustrated by Notes.”
140 Messages of the Old Religions.
human things? Is it not far more probable that
the idea of caste was itself an expression of this
sense of human nothingness, and that the degrees
by which she regulated the ladder of earthly great-
ness were degrees in the power to sacrifice and
superiorities in the strength of self-surrender?
The Message of India. 141
CHAPTER WI.
THE SUBJECT COMPLETED.
HAS the Indian message of life now reached its con-
summation ? It has proclaimed in its second stage
that the world, which originally seemed a scene of
perfection, is a scene unfitted to man — a scene
which man ought to get rid of. Is this the last
word on the subject 2 Does life rise into moral
heights in proportion as it rises beyond the seen
and temporal 2 India herself must furnish the
answer, and her answer is an emphatic negative.
Perhaps the votaries of Brahmanism are at once
the most religious and the most immoral of all
sects. They are pervaded with a sense of the
nothingness of time, and their whole idea is directed
to rising above this nothingness. But this negative
relation towards the world is far from being favour-
able to morality. It may have the advantage of
leading a man not to fret, but it leads him at the
same time not to act. If time is but a vision of the
night, if the forms of earth are but the images in a
142, Messages of the Old. Religions.
dream, there is nothing good any more than bad in
the world; there is simply illusion. To abstain
from righteous living is to abstain from vanity; to
engage in unrighteous living is to do something
which is not real, and if not real, then not really
harmful. Accordingly the creed of Brahmanism is
consistent with itself in its very inconsistency. It
tells men to be sacrificial, and to realise their own
nothingness. It, tells them to look, with contempt
upon the things of space and the events of time.
Yet it bases its precept upon the fact that they are
things of space, and that they are events of time.
The contempt is thus poured not only on acts of:
vice, but on all acts whatsoever. Every work,
whether virtuous or vicious, is but a gesture in a
dream. The virtuous act can do no good, and the
vicious act can do no harm ; they are both unreal-
ities. Is it inconsistent in the Brahman to hold
lightly the requirements of conscience 2 Is it strange
that, with a creed which reduces everything to in-
difference, his own life should exhibit side by side.
the depths of self-surrender and the heights of self-
indulgence? Is it peculiar that at one and the same
moment we should find him prostrating himself in
abject reverence before the altar, and putting forth.
his hand to defraud his brother man 2"
* * The moral tendency of Brahmanism is finely described by Pro-
fessor Wilson, ‘Essays and Lectures, chiefly on the Religion of the
Hindoos," ii. 75. Edit. London. t • * t
The Message of India. . 143
We have not, then, reached the final word of the
Indian message. There is a stage yet to come in the
development of Indian life, because there is a stage
yet to come in the development of universal life.
There is a time in the life of every man in which
the primitive vision of this world's glory vanishes,
and in which the cry of the human spirit is only to
get free. It is the period of man's asceticism, the
period in which his whole desire is to be eman-
cipated from the present order of things, and to be
ushered into a life in which time shall be no more.
It is a period highly favourable to what is popularly
called religion, but highly unfavourable to what is
universally known as morality. The world is dwarfed
to the view, but for that very reason its interests
dwindle. If there vanishes the temptation to do
wrong, there goes out with it also the incentive
to do right. If the world is contemplated merely as
a thing which passes away, we shall have as little
respect for the virtues as for the lusts of it. Ac-
cordingly, for the universal life of man, as for the
particular life of India, there is wanted a completing
stage. He has realised the fact that the world is
a scene of care, and he has sought to get rid of
care by getting rid of the world. This is equiva-
lent to ending the pains of life by an act of suicide,
Is there any other mode of getting rid of the pains
of life 2 There is, and it is one which has been tried
by all nations. It is the method of life's afternoon,
144 Messages of the Old Religions.
as distinguished from either its morning or its mid-
day. In its morning its individual hopes are high,
and it sees a world whose streets are paved with
gold. In its mid-day its individual cares are deep,
and it beholds a world only worthy to vanish away.
But with its afternoon there comes a thought differ-
ent from either the one or the other, unlike the
morning and unlike the mid-day. There breaks
upon it the conviction that there is a possibility of
escaping individual care without leaving the world,
without leaving care itself. Is it not possible to
get rid of my burden by taking on another's burden,
to drop the weight of the individual life by lifting
the weight of the universe ? Such is the question
that sooner or later is asked by every developed
man; such was the question that was now about
to be asked by India. She had tried the wings of
a dove by which to fly away from the world, but
she had found that this power of flight had not
exalted her. Was there no other escape for her-
self than by flying away ? Might she not stand in
the midst of the world and be unworldly, in the
midst of care and be free ? Was there not a method
of life remaining by which the spirit of man might
enter into rest here and now, and in the very heart
of the busy crowd might experience that peace which
passeth understanding 2
The answer to this question was the birth of one
of the greatest religious systems which have ever
The Message of India. 145
dominated the mind of man — a system which at
the present moment numbers amongst its Votaries
a large proportion of the earth's population," and
which ranks in moral intensity second to Christianity
alone. I allude of course to Buddhism—the third
great movement of the Indian mind, and one of
the mightiest movements in the mind of the world.
Let us try to mark distinctly the precise point of
contrast between the old faith and the new, between
the creed called Brahmanism and this new concep-
tion of the life of man. On one point they were
agreed: both recognised the fact that this world was
a state of nothingness. Where they differed was in
the conclusion they derived from this position.
Brahmanism said, “This world is a state of nothing-
ness, therefore look up ; turn away your eyes towards
the things which are unseen and eternal.” Buddhism
said, “This world is a state of nothingness, therefore
look down; when you are oppressed with a sense
of your individual woe, try to contemplate the fact
that this woe is not yours alone, but something
which belongs to life as life. In your hour of sorrow
and care, instead of turning away from the world,
endeavour to contemplate the world more closely.
Look bonoath the surface, and you will find that
the Sorrows and cares which you experience are
but fragments of a vast weight of suffering which
* On this point see Professor Max Müller's ‘Chips from a
German Workshop,” i. 214.
K.
146 Messages of the Old Religions.
is pressing with equal intensity on the whole mass
of humanity. In contemplating that fact, you will
find a more complete solace than ever was experi-
enced by the Brahman in his attempt to fly from
the scene. You will learn that in the scene and
not beyond it is the true secret of rest. Your own
burden will fall in the very act of lifting your
brother's. In the realisation that the weight is
universal, it will cease to be particular. In the
sense that you are bearing a common load, you
will forget everything that is individual or un-
common, and in the midst of a world of war you
will feel a great calm.”
You will observe that the main distinction here
between Brahmanism and Buddhism lies in the
difference between a levelling up and a levelling
down. Brahmanism is essentially a levelling up ;
it teaches emancipation from the cares of the world
by rising into another world. Buddhism is dis-
tinctively a levelling down. It is conceived in the
interest of the democracy. It proposes a remedy for
universal man, and therefore it places that remedy
within the reach of the lowest. It objects to the
Brahmanical method, because that method appeals
only to the transcendental few. It feels that when
you tell a man to lose himself in God, you tell
him to do something which demands a long spiritual
training, and presupposes a preliminary education
in the divine life. It perceives that such a precept
The Message of India. 147
will inevitably end in the privilege of a caste, and
that the prize for self-surrender will be won by
the more refined professions. Buddhism aspires
to be the religion of the people; it seeks a remedy
for man as man. It tries to find a refuge for those
wants which are at the foot of the social ladder,
and which, because they are at the foot of the
social ladder, belong equally to all men. Accord-
ingly, the refuge which Buddhism proposes is a
refuge which can be sought and found alike by
the lowest and the highest. It involves no meta-
physical knowledge, it requires no transcendental
flights, it prescribes no unnatural asceticism. It
does not ask an abandonment of the present world,
or the thought of it; it demands rather a deeper
entrance into the thought of it. It tells the man
of toil to look at his own toil as exemplified in
another, the man of Sorrow to contemplate his
sorrow in the face of his brother-man. It tells
him that by ceasing to view his cross as exclusively
a private possession, it will cease to be a private
possession at all. It tells him that what he wants
to give him rest is not a diminished but an in-
creased sense of the pain of life, and that if he only
widen his horizon far enough to embrace the fact that
grief is universal, he will enter into personal peace
alid learn the secret of emancipation from care."
* For a full exposition of these views, see Hardy, ‘Manual
of Buddhism,’ p. 496.
148 Messages of the Old Religions.
The system in modern times would be pronounced
one of secularism. It would be called the gospel
of humanity to distinguish it from any theological
gospel. Without denying either God or immor-
tality, it persistently ignores both. It ignores them
not on the ground of any rational difficulties, but
simply and solely on the ground of their own
practical inutility, of their powerlessness to effect
the redemption of mankind. And yet I am far from
thinking that in the historical circumstances which
prompted the rise of Buddhism, it is adequately
described by the word secularism. That it ignored
God and immortality is true, but what God, and
what immortality ? It was a God who was believed
to stand to the world in a relation of antagonism,
an immortality which was thought to consist in the
annihilation of material life. The God of Brahman-
ism was not coextensive with the universe; He did
not embrace in His being the works and ways of
time. The immortality of Brahmanism was a life
which could only exist by the destruction of earthly
life; it had no place in the secret of its pavilion for
the perpetuation of temporal interests. Against
this partial Deity, against this limited immortality,
Buddhism raised its voice in protest. In that
protest lies its value; its so-called secularism is the
secret of its power. It would have been a very
different matter if Buddhism had arisen to expel
God from the world ; it would then have been
The Message of India. 149
entitled to be styled atheism. But we must never
forget that the God of Brahmanism was already
expelled from the world, and that in the creed of
the Brahman the earth as such was already without
a helper. When Buddhism appeared, it appeared to
vindicate a neglected element. It stood up to
advocate the cause of something which had been
overlooked in the scheme of creation—the temporal
life of man. It was willing to leave to the ancient
Deity His original possessions in a transcendental
heaven, but it asked to be allowed the possession
of a field which had never been included within
His dominions. It demanded the right to redeem
the world through the world. It declared that
there had been sufficient sacrifice to God, that the
time was come for a sacrifice to man—a sacrifice
which should be effected not by the hands of any
consecrated priest, but by the hand of every man
stretched out in aid of his brother. It maintained
the doctrine of a universal priesthood, bound to
accomplish a universal redemption by the lifting up
of a universal burden."
The truth is, the triumph of Buddhism lies in
its protest against asceticism. That which gave
if power nwer Brahmanism was ifs unascetic tend-
ency. The view is frequently held that it has
* Buddha's own personal power lies in the belief that he has
voluntarily submitted to sacrifice in order to be in sympathy with
humanity (Hardy, Manual of Buddhism, p. 98).
150 Messages of the Old Religions.
derived its influence from the same root as mon-
asticism ; it has in fact derived its influence from
exactly the opposite root. Monasticism was the
shrinking of men into a place of refuge from the
conflict of life and the burden of the day; it was
essentially a retirement from the world. Buddhism
was, on the contrary, a withdrawal from that retire-
ment ; it was an effort of the human mind to get
rid of its isolation from common things, and to
mingle once more in the pursuits and interest of
the crowd. The relation of the two systems is
not one of resemblance but of contrast. Mon-
asticism has owed its power to the worldly nature
of the age which has preceded it, to the weariness
of minds that have been living long in the pursuit
of earthly vanities. Buddhism has owed its power
to the unworldly nature of the age which has
preceded it; to the fact that men have been long
immured in a life of transcendentalism, and are
eager to join again in the concourse of the busy
crowd.
It is the sacrificial character of Buddhism which
has blinded the general reader to the view of its
unascetic nature. It has been taken for granted
that a life which is sacrificial must of necessity be a
life which is separated from the world. The truth
is precisely the reverse, and one of the great mis-
sions of Buddhism has been to teach us the reverse.
The life most full of sacrifice is not that of the
The Message of India. 151
cloister but of the city. The heaviest burden which
man has to bear is not the burden imposed by
solitude, but the burden laid on him by society.
It may be truly said that the most solitary moments
in the life of man are precisely those moments in
which he is least ascetic. He never realises the
weight of his own personality to such a profound
degree as when he is moving in contact with the
masses of mankind. It is true, the weightedness is
no longer for self but for others; yet the most
selfish solicitude is not half so sacrificial. Buddhism
professes to conquer individual pain, but it professes
to conquer it by imparting to the individual the
sense of a universal pain. It has been said that
the aim of Buddhism is the extinction of desire;
this is a mistake. The aim of Buddhism is the ex-
tinction only of individual desire, and it proposes
to extinguish it by a higher and a wider desire.
Buddhism, in short, offers to the world a new remedy
for individual pain—a remedy which in its nature
is homoeopathic, and which cures by an application
resembling the old disease. That remedy is love
—itself a sensation of pain, and itself a source of
sacrifice. By the entrance into the love of humanity,
Buddhism suggests the possibility of cntering into
a life which shall be sacrificial because it is not
ascetic, and which shall give to the individual man
a greater power to bear, precisely because it shall
free him from the contemplation of his own burden.
152 Messages of the Old Religions.
There is another point in which I differ somewhat
from the popular estimation of Buddhism. It is
universally said to be a pessimistic system. In a
certain sense this is true; but in what sense 2 In
the same sense in which Mohammedanism may be
said to be a sensuous religion. No man could deny
that Mohammedanism allows a latitude to morals
which would not be suffered by Christianity. Yet
the man who would therefore state that the aim of
Mohammedanism was to found a religion which
should minister to the lusts of human nature, would
be stating an untruth. Mohammedanism was in-
tended to be, and actually succeeded in being, a
reform in morals. It came to curtail the licences
and the excesses of mankind. It stopped short of a
thorough reform, and arrested itself before it had
reached the total extermination of licence; but what
it left unexpunged cannot be laid to its charge. It
belongs to that old régime which the religion of the
Prophet came to circumvent, and it ought to be
viewed rather as the survival of a past culture than
as a result of the new system. The legitimate fruit
of Mohammedanism was the excess which it suc-
ceeded in diminishing; it is only indirectly answer-
able for the abuses which it has been too weak to
abolish. e
Now, precisely analogous to this is the position of
Buddhism. Still less than the religion of Mohammed
is it an Original System. It was the child of Brah-
The Message of India. 153
manism, and therefore it was the heir to an estate
of misery. Brahmanism was essentially the religion
of despair. It had no hope whatever for the present
world, and it made no effort to redeem it; its only
hope was to be redeemed from it. The future to
which it looked forward was a personal annihilation
—a state in which the soul should be freed not only
from every remembrance of the earth, but from every
earthly form and human embodiment. As the child
of such a mother, Buddhism came by nature into an
inheritance of pessimism. Yet it must be confessed
that she did not accept that inheritance without
modification. Her , whole aim was to improve it.
Her leading purpose was the reverse of pessimistic;
it was the attempt to find a break in the cloud of
Brahmanism. Buddhism started on her path with
the determination to discover in the world itself a
ground for hope. I do not know what views she
had about the state beyond the world. Her ideal
was a paradise called Nirvana. Whether in the
future state it meant annihilation or merely rest, I
cannot say ; the most eminent Eastern Scholars are
still on this point divided." But the point for us to
observe is that, in the original view of the Buddhist,
the attainment of Nirvana was not limited to a
future state; it might be reached here and now.
* See, for example, on the one side Max Müller, “Buddhaghosha's
Parables,’ xxxix.-xlv.; on the other Gogerly, “Journal of the Royal-
Asiatic Society,” Ceylon Branch, 1867-1870, Part i. p. 130.
154 Messages of the Old Religions.
In Buddhism, as in Christianity, there comes a
message of peace on earth and goodwill to men—of
peace on earth because of goodwill to men. There
comes a message to the individual soul that, by
fixing its thoughts upon the universal sorrow, its
own troubles will melt away. This is the prospect
of a present heaven," of a life of rest which is to be
reached in the earthly sphere, and to be reached
through the very struggles which the earthly sphere
involves. A religion which could formulate such a
doctrine may be secular indeed, but cannot be wholly
pessimistic. It must have in it something beyond
pessimism, something which recognises a silver lining
in the cloud, and which, through the present gloom,
discerns the coming day.
I arrive, then, at this conclusion : There is in Bud-
dhism an element of pessimism and an element of
optimism; but the element of pessimism is derived,
the element of optimism is original. The former
is the fruit of her parentage; it is received by
inheritance from Brahmanism. The latter is the
result of her own native energy, and is the attempt
to modify the natural conditions of her life. Now,
in estimating the influence of Buddhism, it will be
necessary to take into account both these elements
* Rhys-Davids indeed says that no Buddhist now expects Nirvana
on earth (article “Buddhism'' in “Encyc. Britan.,’ ninth edition);
it may be so, but modern Buddhism makes up for this by its more
definite view of the future.
The Message of India. | 55
—the pessimism which she has derived from her
parent, and the optimism which she has received from
her own nature. The influence of Buddhism has
been great, yet I think I shall be generally borne
out in the assertion that it has been disappointing.
It has fallen short of the claims set up by the re-
ligion. These claims were universal; it aimed at
nothing less than the emancipation of mankind, the
redemption of all sorts and conditions of men. Has
its influence been universal? has its effect been
adequate to its claim 2 Assuredly not. It may
have embraced numerically a larger number of vot-
aries than any other religion, but numbers are in
this sphere not the test of success. It may have
proved the light of Asia, but to the eyes of Europe
it has presented the aspect of a very dim twilight.
The question is, Why? It is a religion with a
beautiful theory, a theory very nearly identical with
that of Christianity; why has Christianity succeeded
where Buddhism has failed ! It is because there is
something in Buddhism which has prevented the
realising of its own theory. And I think it will
be found that this retarding element has been pre-
cisely the point adverted to—the blending of pessi-
mism and optimism in its constitution. I think it
will be found that the progress of Buddhism has
been doubly impeded, and impeded from opposite
sides. It has been arrested on the one hand by the
natural pessimistic tendency which it derived from
I 56 Messages of the Old Religions.
*.
its ancestral descent ; it has been arrested on the
other by that native optimistic tendency which be-
longed essentially to its own nature, and by which
it strove to ameliorate the misery which it had been
taught to seek in man.
We begin with the former—the pessimistic im-
pulse which it derived from Brahmanism. This
Original pessimism is, in my opinion, one great source
of its failure to realise its own theory. What is
that theory It is the doctrine that, by fixing the
love of the heart on universal man, the burdens of
the individual heart will fall. Very good; but on
what ground are we to fix the love of the heart
on universal man 2 The Buddhist answers, On the
ground of human misery. He tells us that the mo-
tive for our love to man is to be a sense of pity—an
impression of the utter helplessness, and the perfect
degradedness, and the Supreme hopelessness of the
life of the human community. Now the question is,
Can such a motive be the basis of love 2 Is it pos-
sible that the practical benevolence of the heart can
ever take its rise in a simple sense of pity unac-
companied by a gleam of hope 2 I think not. In
point of fact there is no instance of a missionary
effort which has not its root in a sense of the
inherent possibilities of the objects to whom it is
to minister. The lower animals occupy a very
degraded position in comparison with man, yet no
one ever dreamed of organising a mission for their
The Message of India. 157
improvement. Why? Simply because it is felt from
the outset that such a scheme would be impossible.
If the case of humanity were deemed from the
beginning as hopeless a case as it appears in Brah-
manism, it is safe to say that there would be the
utter absence of any stimulus sufficiently strong to
accomplish the elevation of human nature. And
it is just here that, as it seems to me, the main
distinction lies between Buddhism and Christianity.
If Christianity has produced an impression on human
nature which Buddhism has failed to produce, it
is because Christianity has an idea of the possibil-
ities of man which Buddhism has failed to realise.
The religion of Christ has started with a perception
of human guilt and sin, but for that very reason it
has started with an impression of man's inherent
greatness. There can be neither guilt nor sin where
there is no responsibility, and there can be no re-
sponsibility where there is not power. The Christian
conception of man is therefore in its root not the
conception of a degraded being. He is contemplated
from the beginning as One who occupies a sphere
which is infinitely below him, and it is here that
his degradation is supposed to lie. He is living
beneath himself; he is dwelling in a far country;
he is subsisting upon food which was only meant
for swine. The call which Christianity gives to
man is not a call which is dictated by mere pity;
it comes ultimately from a sense of human possi-
I 58 Messages of the Old Religions.
bility. It is stimulated by the belief that this being,
who is crushed down by labour and heavy-laden-
ness, was yet made for rest, and has the capacity to
attain rest. Therefore it is that Christian work for
man has been so much more successful than Bud-
dhist work for man. It has started from a different
basis—a basis of hope. It has been prompted by no
mere sense of compassion, but by an impression
that the object is worth working for, and that the
work will repay our pains. It has been begun and
continued in the consciousness that the life for
which we labour is essentially divine, and that the
latent divinity within it shall sooner or later make
it great.
But, as we have Said, there is another side to the
subject. If Buddhism is pessimistic by descent, it
is optimistic by nature, and to this native optimism,
as well as to its derived pessimism, has much of
its failure been due. Buddhism has no hope for
the life of the universe, but it has great hope for
the life of the individual, and it is the hope, and
not the despair, which impels it. Its primary
motive is individual rest. It prescribes work for
the sake of Nirvana. It advises each man to take
upon himself the burdens of the universe, just in
order that his own burden may fall. It tells him
that, by lifting the universal load, his own weight
shall disappear ; that when the Sorrows of others
have cast their shadows Over him, his sorrows shall
The Message of India. I 59
be buried in the sea. This is all very well and all
very true; but it is one thing to reach it as an ex-
perience, it is another and a very different thing to
start with it as a theory. Every self-sacrificing
man shall find the reward of his sacrifice in the
death of individual pain; but if he makes that
reward the motive of his sacrifice, will it not lose
its sacrificial character? Buddhism, strange as it
may seem, is in One aspect a selfish creed, as selfish
as any system of pleasure-seeking. That which it
seeks is not pleasure, but only an absence of pain;
none the less is it sought for the sake of individual
advantage. It aspires to lift the burdens of life in
order that, in lifting the burdens of another, each
man may rest from his own labours. This may be
very prudent and very far-seeing; it is certainly
very optimistic. But is it in any real sense sac-
lificial 2 Is it, an impulse of spontaneous love,
originating in devotion to humanity, and impelled
by no other force than its intrinsic power 2 Is it
not, on the contrary, a process of studied calculation,
in which benevolence is contemplated with the view
to a personal end, and in which the Service of man
is proposed in the interest of a selfish calm ?
Tet me put the matter in a nutshell. In an early
Christian document I find these words written of
the founder of another religion, “Who for the joy
that was set before Him endured the cross, de-
spising the shame.” Here is a profession of open
160 Messages of the Old Religions.
optimism. But let us observe carefully its differ-
ence from the Buddhist optimism. Christianity
declares that she is impelled towards her mission
of benevolence by a prospective joy. But what joy 7
It is the joy of hoping and believing that her mission
will be successful, that her labour will be crowned,
that the humanity for which she toils will ulti-
mately be redeemed. Is that the Buddhist optim-
ism 2 It is the reverse of that. The Buddhist has
no hope for the redemption of the race; that is not
the joy which is set before him. The joy which is
set before him is the prospect of emancipation from
personal care. The hope which impels him towards
benevolence is the hope that, in pursuit of the uni-
versal burden, the sense of individual want shall
be forgotten, and the Soul of the individual man
shall enter into Nirvana. Christianity is hopeful;
Buddhism is hopeful also, but it is not hopeful
likewise. The hope of Christianity is the prospect
of a redeemed world; the hope of Buddhism is the
search for a Stoic's calm through the sense that the
world is incapable of being redeemed. And the
reward of each has been proportionate to its aim.
Christianity has spread its light over a sea of wave
and storm, and its light has mingled with the wave
and subsisted through the storm. Buddhism has
poured its beams over a windless, waveless Ocean,
and its beams have lost their movement and entered
into the ocean's repose. Buddhism has had its
The Message of India. 161
message for the world—a noble, a divine message
in relation to the Brahmanic past. But its message
has long since been delivered, and its mission has
long since been fulfilled. It has no voice for the
progressive life of the West, no movement with the
waves of the modern Sea. It has sought a Stoic's
calm, and a Stoic's calm has been its goal. It
remains still as a monument of noble effort and a
record of high aspiration; but its record extends not
beyond the range of ancient times, and even at its
loftiest Zenith it subsists only as the “Light of
Asia.”
162 Messages of the Old Religions
CHAPTER VII.
THE MESSA GE OF PERSIA.
PARSISM, or the religion of Persia, is the second
attempt of the ancient world to explain the great
problem of human suffering. All religions of the
world, whether ancient or modern, have had their
rise in an effort to explain that problem. Even the
unspeculative mind of China was induced to con-
struct a religion by a sense of the social difficulties
which prevailed in the natural state of man. But
China did not encounter the problem; when brought
face to face with it she ran away. Her whole
system is based upon the presentiment that the evils
of social life have their origin in social development,
and that the only way to get rid of these evils is to
go back to a primitive type having its roots in the
far past. China, accordingly, does not attempt to
grapple intellectually with the difficulties that sur-
round the path of man. She is content to leave
these difficulties unsolved. Her whole effort is to
avoid them, to get into a state of life where they do
The Message of Persia. 163
not exist; and she believes that she will compass
this aim by retracing her steps into a region of
primitive simplicity over which the forms of subse-
quent civilisation exert no power.
It is to India that we must look for the first de-
liberate effort to face the problem of human suffer-
ing. We have seen how, in India, the awakening to
that problem was somewhat slow. We have seen
how her earliest view of life was rose-coloured, and
therefore false. We have seen how she started with
the belief that this world is a pleasure-ground, a
place where men are put to sport and play. And
we have seen how this belief was broken into frag-
ments by the stern facts of experience. India woke
from her delusion to an even exaggerated view of
the misery of life. She passed from an unqualified
Optimism into an unrelieved pessimism, an antag-
onism to things as they are. Unlike the Chinese
empire, she did not fly back from the shadow that
she had conjured; she prepared to meet it, to face
it—if possible, to account for it. She felt, and
rightly felt, that when an evil is explained, one half
of its sting has vanished. Accordingly India set
herself to explain this evil. She accomplished her
object in a manner satisfactory to horself, and by a
method short and easy. She had found the optim-
ism of life to be a delusion; she decided that its
pessimism was also a delusion. She came to the
conclusion that earthly life, as such, did not exist—
&
1 64. Messages of the Old Religions.
that everything in this world below was but part of
a dream. This life which man calls human was in
reality the dream of God. The divine Spirit had
passed into a state of sleeping consciousness, in
which the images and forms were unreal, and in
which the most tangible experiences were but
shadows of the night. This world was a vain show,
an appearance, an illusion. The only reality was
that which dwelt behind it, and that which dwelt
behind it was the Almighty. The dream implied a
dreamer, but the dreamer could only be reached by
the annihilation of the dream. Things were not
what they seemed, and he who would attain their
reality must awake to the conviction of their im-
aginary character.
Let us consider, in passing, the extreme fascination
of this idea. It was not merely fascinating as an
intellectual speculation ; I believe its main attrac-
tiveness lay in its influence over the moral nature.
There are times in which we of modern days feel
the same attractiveness, experience almost a wish
that it might be true. As we look abroad upon the
sin and sorrow of the world, as we contemplate the
apparent inequalities in the destinies of men, as we
survey the misery and squalor and penury which
dwell side by side with prodigal wealth and lavish
luxury, we ask a thousand times for a vindication of
the justice of God. At such seasons the thought
sometimes enters the mind, What if it is all a
The Message of Persia. 1.65
dream 2 What if we should awake and find that
the things we wept over, prayed over, agonised over,
had never any existence outside our own imagining 2
What if those experiences of life which suggested a
doubt of the justice of God should be themselves
illusions, apparitions of the fancy, nightmares of the
sleep 2 Would not the very thought of such a
possibility convey to the mind a sense of present
calm, and suggest at least a method by which, in the
days to come, the plans of Omnipotence might be
vindicated 2
Such I believe to have been the moral strength
of Brahmanism. Its mere fantasticness would have
been against its continuance, its pronounced specu-
lativeness would have been adverse to its popular-
ity; but its suggestion to the trembling heart was
the secret of its power. It held out to the hour
of trouble the idea that the trouble was an illusion.
It told Job that his sufferings were inflicted by
his own imagination, and that the Being whom he
blamed for them had never once extended an aggres-
sive hand. In stimulating such a belief, Brahman-
ism did something for the moral life; it helped it
to rest under the shadow in the conviction that
the shadow was no part of the divine. Neverthe-
less it was impossible in the light of reason that
such a view could long maintain itself. It was
inevitable that a time should come in which men
would enter on a deeper questioning. Whence this
166 Messages of the Old Religions.
dream, and whence its sadness 2 Is not the sorrow
of a dream as real as the sorrow of a waking hour
—as real in feeling, though imaginary in its cause ?
Are not the pains of the sleeping consciousness
quite as genuine in their nature, and sometimes as
hurtful in their effects, as the pains of the outer
life 2 And is not the universe as responsible for
the former as for the latter ? Is it not specially
responsible for the former on the Brahmanical
supposition that this dream is the dream of the
Absolute Spirit 2 If it originates in the nature of
God, must there not in the universe be some barrier
to the nature of God 2 Must there not be some-
thing radically wrong—wrong at the core, wrong in
the essence of things 2 That which interferes with
man may be only a relative evil; but surely that
which interferes with God must be evil absolute
and eternal.
Such was the question which at last was asked
by a religion that originally belonged to the same
family as the men who compiled the Vedas." At
what time it separated itself from that family I
cannot tell—whether it remained behind in Some
old dwelling after the other inmates had left, or
whether it itself went out to seek a dwelling more
commodious than theirs. Be this as it may, we do
* In proof of this see Max Müller's “Last Results of the Persian
Researches,” as reported in Bunsen’s ‘Philosophy of Universal His-
tory,’ i. 112 ; also Spiegel, “Avesta,’ 1-5 : Leipzig, 1852,
The Message of Persia. 167
know that ultimately this religion, which we now
call Parsism, assumed, under the name of a dis-
tinguished prophet, an attitude of antagonism to
the old Brahmanic faith. That prophet was Zoro-
aster. Carlyle has said that great men have short
biographies; Zoroaster has no biography at all.
He comes to us like a shadow, and like a shadow
he goes. There has gathered round his name a
series of sacred writings whose latest echoes have
come down to us in a collected form under the
title of the ‘Avesta.’" But the figure round whom
they gather is a veiled figure. God is said to
have concealed from the Hebrews the body Of
Moses; He has concealed from all men the bodily
life of Zoroaster. Who was the man 2 What was
his ancestry Where was his birthplace 2 When
was his era 2° Did he live in the thirteenth cen-
tury of the old world, or did he live in its sixth
century, or did he ever live at all? All these
questions have been asked and have been vari-
ously answered. That Zoroaster did live at some
time is almost certain ; that he flourished some-
what contemporaneously with Buddha is highly
probable; beyond this nothing can be known of
the man as a personality. We are made to feel
* Translated with commentary by Professor De Harlez. Second
ed., Paris, 1881.
* See a list of the conflicting testimonies with respect to his age
in Dr John Wilson, ‘The Pārsī Religion, pp. 398-400: Bombay,
1843.
168 Messages of the Old Religions.
that he fills a gap in history, but he fills it in-
visibly. We are sometimes conscious that there is
a presence in the room even where there is no
sight and no sound. Some such sensation we ex-
perience in contemplating the presence of Zoro-
aster. We see him not, we hear him not, yet we
feel that he occupies a space which naturally
would be vacant, and therefore we know that he
is there. x
What is the filling of this space which is occu-
pied by Zoroaster ? What is the nature of that
message which he is supposed to have given to
the world, and which appears in the writings that
have circled round his name As I have indicated,
it strikes a note which was neglected by the Indian
Pantheon." That neglected note was the reality
of an obstructive element in nature. The Indian
religion, in all its phases, denied this obstructive
element. Brahmanism took a gloomy view of the
world, but she held her own view to be a delusion.
Human life was in her eye a sad and imperfect
thing, but human life was at the same time to her
an unreality. It was a dream, an illusion, a vision
of the night, a phantom in the brain of a higher
life—the Absolute Spirit itself. All the sorrows
of existence were but stirrings in the sleep of the
* The antagonism appears in the fact that many of the gods of
India are the devils of Parsism. See Professor K. Geldner, article
“Zoroaster,” “Encyclopædia Britannica,” ninth edition,
The Message of Persia. 169
Almighty, partial interruptions of that rest which
the Divine Life had enjoyed from of old. Zoro-
aster asked, Whence this interruption ? He said,
“If there be in the universe something which can
interrupt the stream of the Divine Life, that some-
thing must be itself not only outside of the Divine,
but equal to it in power. That which can oppose
God must be not only alien to God, but possessed
of an alien strength. If this life be a dream of
the Absolute Life, whence comes the dream 2 Shall
you say that the stream of the Divine vitality is
inadequate to supply the whole course of its way ?
Is it possible that God in Himself should faint
or grow weary 2 And if He does faint and grow
weary, must there not be some other than Himself?
Must there not be in the universe some element
obstructive to the Divine — an element which is
strong enough to oppose the Absolute Will, and
powerful enough to paralyse its operations !”
This in effect was the question of Zoroaster. He
felt, and rightly felt, that it is no explanation of
the feeling of suffering to Say that it is a sensation
in a dream—that the problem will always remain,
Whence arose this dream 2 He felt that Brahman-
ism had stopped short of the ultimate inquiry, that
she really escaped no difficulties which her system
was designed to escape. Accordingly Zoroaster stood
forth in the midst of the universe, and declared that
there was something wrong in it. He proclaimed
170 Messages of the Old Religions.
in stentorian tones that there was a crack in the
machine, and a crack from the beginning. This is
the first note of his message to the world. I shall
show in the next chapter that it involves other and
deeper notes, and shall endeavour to estimate the
value of that thought which he revealed. But
meantime I wish to mark the fact that this message
of Zoroaster is the first deliberate and systematic
testimony given by the Aryan religious consciousness
to the existence of sin." Commonplace as it sounds
to the modern ear, it was to the ancient ear very
nearly a paradox. It struck a chord which, almost
in its subject and altogether in its intensity, was
new. Hitherto the ancient world had been directed
either by the terrible, the beautiful, or the specula-
tive. Men had worshipped from fear; they had
worshipped from admiration ; they had worshipped
from philosophic instinct. They were now to be
directed to a new Source of adoration—the testi-
mony of conscience. In Zoroaster the Aryan race
opened its eyes upon the great problem of morality
—the fact of sin. In a more pronounced sense than
even Judaism, Parsism emphasised the power of
moral evil. With the Jew there is always in the
background a conviction, half latent and half ex-
! Professor Wilson has pointed out that, although there are a
few exceptions, the large majority of the Vedic prayers are for
purely temporal blessings, and that the moral consciousness is
mostly in abeyance (Lectures, pp. 9, 10, Oxford, 1840).
The Message of Persia. | 7 |
pressed, that sin, with all its horrors, has still been
made the servant of God, been compelled against
its will to minister to the divine purposes. But
in Parsism no such accommodation is either im-
plied or permitted. Sin stands out not only as
the enemy of God, as it does in Judaism, but as a
frustrator of the plan of God. A Jew would never
have admitted that anything could frustrate God's
plan; to him the wrath of the wicked itself was
made to praise God. But to the follower of Zoro-
aster every evil deed was for ever outside the gates
of the divine kingdom. The acts of human sin
could never be made stones in the temple of holi-
ness. The development of goodness could only be
promoted by goodness; there was no possibility of
things evil being made to work together for a higher
goal. The stream which flowed from the fountain
of wickedness was a stream which never mingled
with the waters of the pure sea ; it held on its
desolating way independent and alone.
For it is the doctrine of Zoroaster that this uni-
verse is not the work of a single being; it is the
work of two. It has come from the hands both of
a Principle of good and of a Principle of evil. This
World has been made by two agents, Ormuzd and
Ahriman. Ormuzd is the principle of good. He is
embodied in the light, which is at once His garment
and His symbol. He is the source of all beauty,
the fountain of all purity, the origin of all morality;
172 Messages of the Old Religions.
from Him cometh down every good and every perfect
gift. Ahriman is the principle of evil. His embodi-
ment is the darkness, and this also both clothes and
symbolises him. He is the source of all deformity,
the fountain of all vileness, the origin of every vio-
lation of moral law; from him ascend those foul
vapours which disturb the atmosphere of the world.
Between these two agencies the life of the universe
is divided. There are angels of light, and there are
angels of darkness—the one obeying the will of
Ormuzd, the other following the behests of Ahriman.
The creatures beneath the angelic line are not sep-
arated by so hard-and-fast a division. Some have
more of Ormuzd in them, some have more of Ahri-
man—all have something of both. This world,
therefore, instead of being a dream, is a stern,
waking battle-field, in which two competitors con-
tend for empire. It is in all its parts a struggle
between light and darkness, in which light strives
to expel darkness, and darkness labours to exclude
light. The struggle reaches its climax in man.
Man is the microcosm of the universe. In him
the forces that elsewhere play on a large scale at
once diminish their scale and increase their in-
tensity. Here Ormuzd and Ahriman meet in their
deadliest conflict. Man, like everything else, has
in him something of both; but, because he is man,
he has more of both than all other things. The
struggle in him is therefore at the fiercest. One
**
The Message of Persia. 173
part of his nature is overshadowed by the darkness,
the other is basking in the light. His Soul is the
battle-field between two competitors, and night and
day the struggle is maintained with alternating suc-
cess and with unvaried fury.
What is man's own part in this conflict I shall
consider in the next chapter. In the meantime I
want to ask, What position does this doctrine hold
in the development of the religious consciousness?
That it is unscientific is beyond a doubt. That this
world is the work of two principles is an idea which
was too crude even for Brahmanism, and which is
incompatible with the modern standpoints of evolu-
tion; though, singularly enough, Something very like
it has been promulgated in our day by one of the
greatest English thinkers—Mr J. S. Mill." Waiv-
ing, however, this point, and conceding the unscien-
tific character of the system, the question remains,
What is its moral bearing 2 At first sight it might
seem to indicate a religious decline. When we hear
of a God whose power is limited by another power,
our earliest impression is that we stand in the pres-
ence of a low spiritual life. But if we look deeper,
and specially if we consider the historical circum-
stances of Parsism, we shall, in this case at least,
come to an opposite conclusion. We have been
taught from childhood to praise the choice of Solo-
mon—to admire that state of mind which could
* See his posthumous essay on Theism,
174 Messages of the Old Religions.
prefer the treasures of wisdom to the treasures of
wealth. But now imagine that this narrative had
been presented to us in another form. Let us Sup-
pose that before the eyes of Solomon there had
floated the alternative of a choice not between wis-
dom and wealth in the abstract, but between wisdom
and wealth in the nature of God. Let us conceive
that in some critical hour it had been revealed to
him that the constitution of this universe could no
longer be deemed compatible with the existence both
of perfect power and of perfect love, and that it
would be necessary for him to give up from his creed
either the one or the other. Let us suppose that in
these circumstances Solomon had decided to hold by
the ideal of perfect love, whatever else might go;
what would our impression be of such a choice 2
Would it not be that the man had displayed a won-
derful amount of moral insight ! Should we not
deem that, in preferring morality to physical strength,
he had, for an Eastern; reached a remarkable height
of development, and a height which was altogether
above the ordinary level of his nation—a nation
which habitually measured a man's moral purity
precisely by the ratio of his outward and physical
prosperity ? -
Now, the case of Zoroaster is exactly parallel to
this. He lived in an age when men had come to
realise the difficulties of human life and the arduous-
ness of the struggle for existence. The problem of
The Message of Persia. 175
divine Providence had pressed upon his soul. It had
become clear to him that, with his present amount
of knowledge, he must adopt one or other of two
alternatives: he must either hold that the Author of
the universe was imperfectly good, or that He was
imperfectly powerful. It was the choice of Solo-
mon repeated, but repeated in the nature of God.
Zoroaster was asked not to choose between morality
and wealth for himself, but between morality and
wealth for his Creator. Without hesitation he chose
morality. He had every Eastern incentive to do the
contrary. He was the member of an empire whose
tastes and aims were physical—an empire which had
set before itself the ideal of outward conquest as the
highest goal of kinghood, and which was prosecuting
that ideal with unflinching pertinacity. Would it
have been surprising if a man trained in such a
school should have preferred the physical to the
mental, and should have deemed that attribute most
divine which expressed most of sensuous power
And when, in his hour of crisis, in which he was
called to choose between God's omnipotence and His
holiness, he made his choice in favour of the latter,
what can we think of such a decision ? What but
that the man who made it was far advanced in the
spiritual life above the measure of his contempo-
raries 2 Is not his choice a declaration that to him
the grandest thing about God is not that which men
have hitherto worshipped—that the thing which he
176 Messages of the Old Religions.
deems most divine is not the thunder and the earth-
quake and the fire of Sensuous majesty, but the still,
small voice which preaches purity of heart 2 He has
before him the alternatives of a God of limited might
and a God of limited love, and without hesitation he
takes the former. Does he not thereby declare that
for him the worshipful element of the universe is not
sense but soul, not height but heart, not depth but
desire, not power but purity ? -
And if he did exaggerate the power of evil, if he
did invest the awful fact of sin with an importance
too great even for itself, let us remember his pro-
vocation. Zoroaster was a protestant—a man who
protested against an existing state of things. The
first protestants always exaggerate; they have no
choice but to do so. The very fact that they are the
earliest on the field of battle causes them to strike
more vehemently. Iuther went too far in justifica-
tion by faith; Calvin went too far with the divine
decrees; Inox went too far in his opposition to
images; and Zoroaster went too far in his estimate
of the power of sin. . He attributed its influence to
the agency of a Force which was strong enough to
compete with God, and in that he doubtless erred.
But into that error he was provoked by a still greater
error on the other side. The Brahman had said that
moral evil was a dream, that the sins and Sorrows
of life were but the fantastic and illusory images of
the sleeping brain. Zoroaster was roused into the
The Message of Persia. 177
opposite extreme. He declared them to be not only
real but eternal realities, part and parcel of the con-
stitution of the universe. His vindication for such
a statement is the fact of his protestantism. He
was the first in the history of Aryan religions who
was called to make a stand in favour of the claims
of conscience. He made that stand against heavy
Odds—against intellectual abstractions which had
buried the instincts of the heart, against nature-
worship which had exalted power over morality,
against an ideal of heroism which had substituted
the strength of the body for the beauty of the
soul. If, in gainsaying this practice of long an-
tiquity, he said too much and went too far, his
excess was itself the result of his moral bias, and
the exaggeration of his doctrine was the prophecy
of a larger life.
178 Messages of the Old Religions.
CHAPTER VIII.
CONTINUATION.
WE have now arrived at a paradox. We have seen
how the foregoing religious systems arose out of an
effort to grapple with some burden of life. Parsism
also arose from an effort to grapple with life's
burdens. But Parsism, unlike the foregoing re-
ligions, ended by adding a new burden. Like
Buddhism, it approached the problem of this world
with a view to emancipate the human mind from
the weight of its sufferings. Yet the conclusion
to which it came was very different from that of
Buddhism. Buddhism proposed that the individual
should emancipate himself by taking up the cares
of the race. Parsism discovered that the deepest
sufferings of life came from a burden which ori-
ginated in the individual alone — a burden which
in its nature was untransferable, which a man
might pity and sympathise with, but could not lift
from the shoulders of his brother. That burden
was sin. To the mind of Zoroaster moral evil was
The Message of Persia. 179
the root of all evil, and moral evil belonged to the
individual man. In assigning this as the cause of
human suffering, he deepened the weight already
pressing on humanity. One would have thought
that the effect would have been to crush still more
utterly the development of the human mind. In
the preceding Aryan races, that development had
already been almost entirely suppressed. The will
of man had sunk into lethargy beneath the weight
of a mystery which it could neither shake off nor
explain, and the waters of human life had become a
Dead Sea. The impartation of an additional burden
might seem to have only completed the process, and
to have effected the final extinction of that spirit
whose powers had been already prostrated.
Yet, strange to say, the effect was the reverse,
and it is just here that the paradox arises. Parsism,
in adding to the existing burdens the new burden
of sin, seemed to have put the final stone upon the
sepulchre of man. In reality it began the process
of his resurrection. For the first time in the
history of Aryanism, the human mind, in the re-
ligion of Zoroaster, breaks forth into spontaneity.
The sleep of ages appears to pass away, and there
begins an age of vital and of waking activity.
India had no history, because one day was the
same as another, and every event was but an
illusion. In Persia, history in the Aryan world
may be said to have begun. Here the lethargy of
180 Messages of the Old Religions.
ages is broken, and man breaks forth into the
activity of outward life. In Persia we see the
anticipation of Rome. We see a nation aiming
at wideness of dominion, not so much by crushing
as by incorporating. We See an empire struggling
towards a headship which shall in some sense
represent the relation of the human head to the
human members. The sovereignty of the Persian
king is the Sovereignty of a feudal superior. He
does not seek to reign alone, he only desires to
reign Supreme. He allows the existence of em-
pires within the empire, of kings and governors
who shall have power within their own sphere if
only they shall acknowledge their common subjec-
tion to himself. It is a Roman ideal of imperialism,
because it is a Roman ideal of the rights of man.
The Persian has awakened to a sense of freedom,
and it colours even his politics. He moves through
history with a free step, and builds his institutions
on the foundations of personal liberty.
But the paradox is still more marked when we
turn from the political to the spiritual region. The
creed of Zoroaster, with its revelation of human sin,
might have been expected to have crushed the soul.
On the contrary, it removed the thing which crushed
it. The proclamation of the additional burden
made man free. The cause of the paradox we shall
presently consider; in the meantime we have to
note the fact. When the Aryan race recognised its
The Message of Persia. 18i
bondage to sin, it woke for the first time to a sense
of freedom. There dawned within the Spirit of
man the conviction that he was a responsible being.
There rose within him the thought that he was not
a machine, not a product of necessity, not the result
of an inexorable law. He began to feel that he was
answerable for his actions. He ceased to think of
the universe as dependent entirely on one Supreme
Will; he came to the belief that man is a fellow-
worker with God. He felt that in the battle
between Ormuzd and Ahriman the human creature
was not a mere possession to be striven for. The
soul of man was itself an agent in the strife; it
could help either the one side or the other. Every
human act, every human thought, every human
confession, every human aspiring, was a weight
thrown into the scale, and made for either good or
evil. Whether it should make for good or evil
depended on the will of man, and for that will he
was responsible. Every day and hour man was
under the judgment-seat of God. There was a re-
cording angel who was writing down the result of
his every deed in a book whose letters were in-
delible.” At the hour of death from out that book
there would be made a reckoning of his actions
and an estimate of the sum of them. When he
I The doctrine of human freedom is clearly expressed in the
Avesta, Yasna, 31, 11. * s
* See Avesta, Vendidad, 19-27.
182 Messages of the Old Religions.
passed from this mortal scene he would have to
cross the Accountant's Bridge—a structure which
metaphorically represented the transition from time
into eternity. Here at last would be determined
the moral import of his life, and according to its
import its reward would be. If the sum of good
had outweighed the sum of evil, he would pass into
the bright land of Ormuzd. If the sum of evil had
outweighed the sum of good, he would travel into
the dark shades of Ahriman. If the balance of
good weighed equally against the balance of evil,
he would be consigned into a state intermediate
between sorrow and joy, waiting for that con-
summation — the final judgment-day which shall
decide the fate of all things.
These are the facts; what is the interpretation of
them 2 How are we to account for the circumstance
that the Aryan race first came to its sense of respon-
sible freedom when it realised its burden of sin 2
There is nothing accidental in the conjunction. It
is the inevitable result of a great principle. As a
matter of fact, man's sense of power is always con-
temporaneous with his sense of moral humiliation.
He only comes to the recognition of his dignity
when he comes to the realisation of his depravity.
Nowhere does the fable of the Phoenix rising out of
its own ashes find so perfect an illustration as in the
spirit of man. The first idea which he receives of
his greatness in the scale of being is directly derived
The Message of Persia. 183
from his experience of moral blame. The point is
so suggestive, and at first sight So paradoxical, as to
merit a few moments’ consideration.
If it be asked where man gets his sense of freedom,
the natural tendency is to answer, “From the powers
of his mind.” And yet so far is this from being true,
that the contrary is the truth. It is not too much
to say that it is from the exercise of his intellectual
powers that man first learns the sense of his bondage.
At the beginning of his life he is conscious neither
of freedom nor of necessity; he lives as a plant lives.
He arrives at the knowledge of his prison-house
only by putting forth his hands. It is when he
begins to exert his powers that for the first time he
learns their feebleness. The freedom of the Indian
mythology was but the freedom of a child, the
spontaneity that exists only because it has never
experienced the sense of contradiction. It was the
infant putting forth its hand to catch the moon.
When the infant found it could not catch the moon,
it became a Brahman—gave up the universe as an
impossible speculation. The Indian mind in its later
stage was the child of abortive effort, the product of
a despair which had arisen from the sense of intel-
loctual incompetency. In the search for universal
knowledge man learns that he is a slave.
Nor is the problem of human freedom much nearer
to solution when the intellectual powers of man
turned from the contemplation of nature to the con-
184 Messages of the Old Religions.
templation of suffering. This was the transition
actually made in the passage from Brahmanism to
Buddhism. Man, having failed to make the intel-
lect a source of absolute knowledge, tried to make
it a source of absolute calm. The effort was not
altogether unsuccessful. Buddhism, as we have seen,
has become the Dead Sea of man. But even in
reaching this calm, Buddhism did not reach the
sense of freedom. She helped a section of mankind
to be resigned to inevitable law, but she left the
law inevitable still. The triumph of the human
intellect in Buddhism was simply the triumph of
discovering that the law was inexorable. It was the
resignation of the Soul to a supposed fact—the fact of
human bondage. Man was deemed to have reached
the pinnacle of wisdom in the discovery of the truth
and in the submission to the knowledge that nothing
is to be expected from life; the mind's charter of
peace was the sense that it could not be free.
The human intellect, therefore, has failed to give
to the mind of man the idea of its own liberty. Is
there any other source from which such a revelation
can arise ? There is, and, strange to say, it is found
in the realising of a new burden—the burden of sin.
It is in the experience of moral want, and in the
humiliation incident to that experience, that man
reaches the sense of freedom. What the intellectual
powers could not do is done by another power—that
state of mind which we call conscience. What is
The Message of Persia. IS5
<3
the testimony of conscience 2 It is the announce-
ment that we have done wrong. But what is implied
in thaf announcement Strange as it may seem, it
contains a double implication; it proclaims at once
the degradation and the glory of man. On the one
hand, it involves a feeling of humiliation; but on
what ground ! On the ground that we are worthy
of blame. What is blame 2 It is the sense that we
could have done better. The testimony of conscience
is not merely the testimony that I am not in a good
state; that could be said of a withering tree. But
what conscience tells me is not simply that I am in
a withering condition, but that I have myself to
thank for it. It tells me that, if I had done other-
wise, things would have been otherwise, and in that
message it says that I am free. It proclaims that
the law under which I suffer is not a law of neces-
sity—that I had power, if I willed, to shake it off and
to walk forth in freedom. I am not discussing the
rightness or the wrongness of that testimony; it is
always open to the man of science to say, as he often
does say, that it is a delusion. But even the man of
science will not deny that, whether real or delusive,
it is there. Whatever be the value of its testimony,
conscience does testify that man is free; the sting of
remorse itself is simply a revelation that the human
soul has done its deeds under no mechanical neces-
sity, but under the influence of a power which it
was always within its province to control.
186: Messages of the Old Religions.
Now, it is here that the strength of Parsism lies.
It has received one burden more than every other
Aryan faith; but that one burden more is the moral
conviction of sin. The result is that the additional
weight has become a wing, and the element which
threatened to bring Parsism to the very dust of
humiliation has become the means of its rising above .
all surrounding religions. It is not difficult to trace
the process by which, from its waking sense of
human corruption, this faith has climbed into the
vision of an all but perfect day. In the conviction
of sin it reached the feeling of blame. In the
feeling of blame it reached the idea of responsibility.
In the idea of responsibility it reached the belief in
freedom. In the belief in freedom it reached the
knowledge that there existed within the universe
a power called Will. In the recognition of that
power it learned, for the first time, that there is a
force which is not material, but antecedent to matter
and independent of its mutations—a force which
mechanical combinations did not create, and which
the dissolution of mechanical combinations needs
not destroy. Finally, from a vision of this indepen-
dent existence it reached the belief in a personal
immortality—an immortality in which the individual
should at once be preserved and sublimated, lifted
from the dust of earth, and intensified by the life of
heaven. -
Thus, as from a germ-cell, there rose out of con-
The Message of Persia. g 187
science a revelation of all things—freedom, person-
ality, God, immortal life. Parsism, by its definite
recognition of the existence of a moral world, came
to a definite recognition of a world of religious
thought. But let us understand that, in order to
realise the power of conscience, it was necessary to
realise the power of sin. It is because Parsism is
the religion of struggle that it is the religion of
morality and immortality. Conscience only begins
where disturbance begins; here as elsewhere, it is
the cloud that reveals the Sunshine. As long as
my nature flows on in a stream of uninterrupted good,
I am unconscious even of the stream. In order to
become conscious I must be arrested in my flow.
Something must intervene to break the uniformness
of the rhythm of life. The beauty of virtue first
asserts itself when I have tried to violate it; the
box of ointment gets its fragrance by being broken.
Parsism climbed further than all Aryan faiths,
because it struggled more than all—nay, because
first among these faiths it experienced the sense
of struggle. It was the child of moral conflict, and .
out of its moral conflict came its revelation of God.
If now it be asked what, according to Parsism, is
to be the outcome of this conflict, the answer is by
no means directly at the door. It is popularly said:
to be an optimistic creed. Measured by Brahman-
ism and Buddhism, it is certainly optimistic; these
were the religions of despair, this is to some extent
188 Messages of the Old Religions.
a religion of hope. The children-of light are not for
ever to remain in darkness; Ormuzd is to get the vic-
tory over Ahriman. But who are to be the children
of light ! How many are ultimately to be included
in the great Salvation ? Is it in the last result to
comprehend all men, or is it to be limited to a part 2.
What is to be the fate of the rejected part 2 Are
they to exist in eternal misery, or are they to be
submerged in a sea of annihilation ? These are
questions on which the commentators of Zoroaster
are divided. Probably in this respect there is the
same ground for divided opinion as exists in Chris-
tianity. In the one, as in the other there are various.
interpretations of the same words. In the one as in
the other there are passages of the sacred books
which seem to make for either side. In the one as
in the other there are opposite castes of mind—those
who by nature are swayed by the dictates of law,
and those who by disposition are dominated by the
sentiment of love.
We shall waive, then, the question whether, ac-
cording to the doctrine of Parsism, there is or is
not prognosticated a final restoration of all things.
But even when we leave this question in the
background, there is an element in this religion
which makes us pause before investing it with the
attributes of optimism. Even though this faith had
declared without ambiguity that all the sons of men
were ultimately to share in the triumph of good-
The Message of Persia. . 189
ness, I would not feel justified in Saying that
Parsism was an optimistic religion. What is optim-
ism 2 It is not merely the belief that all things
shall at last be well; it is the belief that all things
shall at last be found to have conspired to the
universal wellbeing. It is not enough for me, when
I am passing through the shadow of grief, to be.
told that a time is approaching in which the shadow.
shall pass away and the full light shall come. That
may be very satisfactory, but it is an animal satis-
faction after all; it is the gratification of being freed,
from pain. What I want in my deepest nature is
more than that ; I want to have the pain vindicated.
I want to have the dark past not only expunged but
explained — to Some extent expunged in being ex-
plaincid. It is all very well that the years of shadow
have come to a close; but they have been years.
From the standpoint of the natural eye they have
involved a loss of time, a waste of being, a dissi-
pation of energy. If I am to call my life optim-
istic, I must be made to feel that the shadow was
a part of the light. I must be convinced that the
seeming waste was no waste, that the apparent void
was full of possibilities, and that the desert potenti-
ally contained within if the blossoming of the rose.
Now, it is in this respect that Parsism fails. Irre-
spective altogether of the question whether it does
or does not cherish a universal hope for man, it
regards the sorrows of life as real sorrows – as
190 Messages of the Old Religions.
absolute blots and blemishes in the constitution of
nature. A human Soul awaking in another world
might, according to this system, be impelled to say,
“Ormuzd has made it all right now.” But even
such a soul, under such circumstances, would not be
impelled to say, “Ormuzd has been making it right
all along.” There can be no joy of retrospect in
the creed of Zoroaster. Parsism may enable its
worshippers to exult in the knowledge that what
was once dark has become day, but it can never
enable them to rejoice in the vision that the dark-
ness was but a shadow of the day. The darkness
came from Ahriman and remains with Ahriman ;
it has neither part nor lot in the final consum-
mation. It has had nothing to do with the de-
velopment of the kingdom of God; it has simply
retarded that development. Whatever happiness
the soul has reached has been reached in spite of
it, in the face of it. The Soul's joy must be the
joy of an escaped bird; it can have no place for
retrospect except a place of horror. It may revel
in its acquired good, but it cannot say that all
things have worked together for that good. Only
the half of things have worked together—the things
of Ormuzd ; the working of Ahriman has been all
for bad, and, even in the final reckoning of accounts,
can have served no purpose in contributing to the
sum of happiness. *
And, with peculiar emphasis is this defect of
The Message of Persia. 191
Parsism accentuated in its doctrine of sin. Zoro-
aster calls upon all men to be saved, and opens
up to many men the way of Salvation. But even
those who have reached that way must be ine
pressed that there is something wanting. It is
not enough that a man should be redeemed, not
enough that he should be loosed from his shackles
and told that he is free. What about that life
which he has lived within the shackles 2 What
about the deeds done in that dark past from which
he has been liberated ? It is all very well that
he himself has been emancipated from the sinking
ship; but the ship is sinking still, and it is sink-
ing through his blame. Can anything be done to
undo the past deeds of the man 2 Parsism answers,
and on its principles can only answer, “No.” There
is no atonement in this religion, no redress of former
wrongs, no times for the restitution of all things.
The sweetest note of Christianity is its promise of
a cancelled past, its message to the weary Soul that
the evil deeds it has done shall be made to work
out a beneficent end. The joy of a Paul was not
only that all things had been made new, but that
old things had passed away. He felt that if he
had planted tares in the past, it was not enough
for him to know that he had now ceased to plant
them. He must be told, if he would be happy,
that the tares he had sown would themselves be
made conducive to the production of a riper wheat.
192 Messages of the Old Religions.
That is what Parsism could not tell him, could not
tell any man. It could promise to Moses a Salva-
tion from his ark of bulrushes; it could predict for
J oseph a liberation from his Egyptian dungeon; but
it could not tell Moses that he had been magnified
through his peril, nor Joseph that the dungeon itself
had made him free. To the furthest horizon of its
vision Parsism remains dualistic still. Even on that
view of its most sanguine disciples, which looks for-
ward to a salvation of universal man, the dualism
continues unbroken and unmodified; for the past is
itself unredeemed, and the errors of yesterday are
written in everlasting colours. The glory of Parsism
has been to exhibit the natural gulf between the
pure and the unholy; it has been reserved for a
loftier faith to construct a bridge between them.
* The Message of Greece. . 193
CHAPTER IX.
THE MESSAGE OF GREECE.
HE who would photograph the spirit of religions
must distinguish carefully between what is spon-
taneous and what is reflective. The former is a
worship; the latter is a philosophy. The religion
of a nation is its impulse towards an ideal; it is
therefore in all its forms essentially a sacred move-
ment. But the philosophic culture of a nation is a
secular and a secularising process; even where it
relates to a religious subject, it breathes the air of
the common day. Nor can it be strictly said that
the philosophy of any nation is a product purely
national; it is always, to a great extent, the result
of conscious appropriation from the best minds of
many lands. Men like Thales and Parmenides, like
Aristotle and Plato, like Epicurus and Zeno, cannot
be said to be simply the offspring of their age and
clime. We are very significantly told that before
they wrote they travelled. Their writing was there-
fore a conscious and deliberate effort to emancipate
N
J 94 Messages of the Old Religions.
themselves from what was purely local and na-
tional, and to reach a basis of thought the ground
of whose recommendation to the world should be
the fact that it was itself grounded on a universal
soil.
Accordingly I shall, in the course of the present
studies, deal with the philosophic sects of Greece
as I have dealt with the philosophic sects of India ;
I shall pass them by. I shall confine this study of
Greek religion to an examination of its earliest
message—that message which preceded all intellec-
tual culture, and was revealed to the spontaneous
instincts of the heart. The period of its nature-
worship is really the distinctive period of Greek
religion; all its other times and modes are the re-
sult, more or less, of foreign influence. What, then,
is this earliest message of the Hellenic faith ? Is
there anything peculiar about it, anything which
marks it out from other forms and gives it the
right to a distinct place among the religions of
the world ! It is popularly called a system of Poly-
theism; but there is nothing new in that. It is
essentially a reverence for the things of nature; but
neither in this is there anything new. . If it is to
be assigned a distinctive place in theology, it must
be on other grounds than these—on grounds which
make its Polytheism unique and its nature-worship
singular. Does there exist in this faith such an
element of peculiarity ? . . . . . . . .
The Message of Greece. fig3.
I think there does. I believe it will be found
that there is one respect in which the religious
worship of the Greek differs essentially from the
religious worship of all other nations, whether Aryan
or Semitic. If I were asked to express epigram-
matically the difference between this religion and
the forms of faith already considered, I might put
it thus: The message of China is to teach the
glories of yesterday. The message of India is to
trace the development of the day. The message
of Persia is to exhibit the struggle between the
day and the night. The message of Greece is to
|
reveal the intensity of the hour. When we have
reached this last point, we have touched hitherto
ūntrodden ground. China led us back to the past;
India drove us forward to the future; Greece-keeps-
us chained within the present. Here for the first
time man looks upon the passing scene, and con-
templates it not as passing but as permanent. Here
for the first time man casts his eye upon the world
as it actually exists, and sets himself to justify—
nay, to reverence—things as they are. Other faiths
had sought their object in the glorification of things;
the faith of Greece seeks its object in that which is T
manifested to the common eye. India descended
from the heavens to the earth; Greece ascends
from the earth to the heavens. On earth she is
always more at home. Her earliest and her latest
philosophy starts from the reverence of things pro-
196. Messages of the Old Religions.
saic. Her earliest came from the men of Ionia."
Instead of looking up like the Indian to the shining
heavens, they adored the water, the air, and the fire;
they found food for their religious contemplation in
the most common and the most commonplace things.
Her latest was the Stoics, the men of prosaic mould
—whose motto was common-sense, whose creed was
sobriety and self-restraint, whose practice was to
check the flight of the emotions, and whose ideal
was bounded by the horizon of material things.”
Now, these tendencies were inherited tendencies;
they came from the primitive religious instinct.
The religion of Greece was essentially and dis-
tinctively the worship of the hour, the investiture
with reverence of the things amongst which she
lived and moved. Her object was to realise the
joy of perception, as distinguished from the joy
of retrospect and the joy of prospect. China had
lived in the former; Persia had lived in the latter;
Greece sought to occupy the middle ground. In
order to occupy that ground unmolested, she put
a wall on either side; she strove to shut out at
once the memory of the past and the foresight
of the future. She aimed to enclose herself within
the bars of the present, and to find there her
* Döllinger regards the Ionic school as materialistic. “The Gen-
tile and the Jew in the Courts of the Temple of Christ,’ London,
1862, i. 250 sq.; see also Cousin, ‘Histoire Générale de la
Philosophie,” Paris, 1867, i. 110,
. * See Döllinger, ibid., i. 349.
The Message of Greece. 197
perfect satisfaction. Hers has been called an op-
timistic creed, yet, in strict accuracy, I doubt if
the name is applicable. Optimism is bound to
take a survey of the universe on every side, to
compare its present with its past, and its future
with its present. Greece does not do that ; she
keeps rigidly within the environment of the hour.
In those early days which constitute her distinctive
days, she has no space either for memory or for
anticipation. She does not look back to reflect
on the years that are gone; the past is to her a
sealed book. As little does she look forward to
contemplate the years that are coming. The Greek
has no bright prospect in the sky of the future.
His only chance of keeping his optimism is to
shut his eyes on that future. Beyond this life all
to him is dark. Of the existence beyond the grave
he has the most gloomy presentiments. It is to
him a half-life, a state of partial consciousness, an
assemblage of unsubstantial shadows. Every time
he thinks of it he is made sad." As he is deter-
mined not to be sad, he refuses to think of it. He
imprisons himself within the moment ; he crowns
the world as it exists now and here. He uncovers
his head to the joy of the scene before him, and
* Achilles says in Homer's “Odyssey’ (book xi. line 488) that he
would rather serve on earth than reign among the dead. Con-
trast the subsequent view in Plato's ‘Phaedo’; this, however, is
no longer the pure product of the Greek mind. , - . . . .
198 Messages of the Old Religions.
declines to worship aught but his native land.
The object of the Greek's adoration is Greece—
Greece as it presented itself to his youthful im-
agination, and as it appeared on the surface to his
outer eye. Like the Chinaman, he may be said to
have his heaven and his earth in the land of his
nativity; but, unlike the Chinaman, he sees them
in the present hour. His worship is the worship
not of yesterday but of to-day; it is the reverence
for things as they are -
t Accordingly, in Greece every object receives a
crown, and receives a crown precisely as it ministers
to the national mind. The things of nature are
adored not because they are natural but because
they are Grecian, and they are adored in those
special colours with which the Greek soil has in-
vested them. There is a strong analogy between
the faith of the Greek and the faith of the Jew—
&l Il analogy all the more strongly marked because
it manifests itself amid things otherwise contrasted."
The Jew recognised a divine presence in every-
thing that related to his country; he made no
distinction between events important and events
trivial; all alike were the voice of God. The
Greek also recognised a divine presence in his
national life, and to him, as to the J ew, that pres-
1 The points of contrast will be found very well indicated in
an article entitled “Greek Mythology and the Bible,” by Julia
Wedgwood, ‘Contemporary Review,’ March 1892. . . .
The Message of Greece. 199
ence filled all things. The difference lay not in the
fact but in the ideal. The national life of Judea
was not the same as the national life of Greece.
Judea was the life of history; Greece was the life
of perception. Accordingly, while the God of Judea
was seen in events, the God of Greece was beheld
in objects. And as the Jew attributed to his God
the most opposite events, the Greek imputed to
his divinity the most diverse objects. In one
sense the Greek is in this respect more remark-
able than the Jew. While to the son of Israel
all acts were ultimately divine acts, the larger part
of them were acts of penalty. But to the son of
}reece there was no place for penalty. In giving
to every object a divine significance, he gave it
that significance absolutely, unqualifiedly. He filled
his universe with God, not as an avenger, or a
vindicator, or a rectifier, but as a presence and a
power, for its own sake precious and in its own
light beautiful. I have used the word “God”
instead of “the gods,” in order to mark the fact
that the presence was universal. The Greek adored
separate divinities, but he saw them everywhere.
There was not a space of his world unoccupied by
the divine, It was not enough that there should
be a Spirit of the grove; it was not even enough
that there should be a Spirit of the tree; there
must be a Spirit for every leaf of the tree. The
result is that the Greek enfolds in his Pantheon
200 Messages of the Old Religions.
the most contrary species of things – forms the
most diverse, ideas the most opposite. Goethe says
that we weave for God the garment by which we .
|
see Him. The Greek wove no garment for God;
he simply cut out patches from the garments of
his fellow-men, and put them together unmethodi-
cally and heterogeneously; he deified the things
around him just because they were around him.
Accordingly, his religion presents a strange medley.
It attributes divinity to objects the most diverse
and sometimes the most opposite. He looked out
upon the manifestation of nature's physical power,
and he called it Zeus—the origin of all things. He
looked in upon the manifestation of mental power,
and he called it Athene—the principle of wisdom.
He contemplated the ideal of manhood in its strength
and beauty, and he called it Apollo; he surveyed
the ideal of womanhood in its chasteness and pur-
ity, and he called it Artemis. He gazed upon the
turbulent and wayward forces of the world, and in
his admiration of the power that kept them right,
he gave that power a name—Poseidon, the god of
the sea. But he beheld other forces which were
wayward, not from their strength but from their
stupidity. He felt that the sheep in the meadow
needed a protector as much as the waves of the
ocean, and therefore he gave the shepherds also a
god—Pan. He surveyed the field of war, and he
deemed it worthy of a presiding divinity—Mars was
The Message of Greece. 201
his god of battle. But when he turned inward to the
domestic hearth, he was equally impressed with the
divineness of a contrary scene, and he signified his
reverence for the life of the family altar by placing
it under the patronage of Hestia. He bowed before
the serious aspects of nature; he deified the power
that forged the thunderbolt. But he had equally a
place of reverence for the pleasure-hour; he had his.
god of wine as well as of fire. He had a seat in his
Pantheon for the god who directs the prosaic courts
of law; but he had an equal throne for the god
who stimulates the poetic flights of eloquence. He
recognised a presiding divinity over the incipient
movements of life, and crowned Demétèr as the
fosterer of the grain. Yet, singularly enough, he
had a temple also dedicated to the movelessness
of death; and he was not afraid to assign a divinity
to those very precincts of the grave which he him-
self so utterly loathed."
The reader will be impressed with the fact that we
have here a very remarkable and a very unique kind
of optimism. In its usual form optimism says, “We
believe that it will be all right in the long-run, though
it is dark now.” The Greek religion says, “We
know nothing about the long-run ; but it is all right
33
now.” The long-run was to the Greek an invisible
* Whoever wishes to study the subsequent symbolism grafted
upon these divinities may consult Sir G. W. Cox, ‘Mythology of
the Aryan Nations,’ - -
202 Messages of the Old Religions.
quantity, and he had no sympathy with the invisible."
The limit to his sympathy was the boundary-line be-
tween the seen and the unseen. Parsism looked for-
ward to a time when the struggle with material things
would be lulled to rest; the joy of Greece was the
perception of the struggle itself. He had no place for
hope; he lived in present experience, and that which
made life to him glad was just the sense of its conflict.
And the reason is plain. The Greek was by nature
an athlete. His Isthmian games were only the ex-
pression of his deepest nature. Competition was his
very atmosphere. He was a born wrestler, a man
who felt from the very beginning that his destiny
was to strive. Is it surprising that he should have
deified in nature that in which he seemed to find
a resemblance to himself 2 Is it wonderful that he
should have projected his own ideal into the earth
and sea and sky of his native land 2 At all events,
he did project it. He saw in the world around him
a reflex of that world which he felt within him. He
recognised in nature the same elements of struggle
which he found in himself, and he consecrated nature
on this ground. He worshipped things as they were
—as they exhibited themselves in the daily struggle
for survival. And because his ideal of excellence
was the power to strive, he bowed his head to things
* The Eleatic and Platonic schools are of course exceptions;
but these are attempts to graft Eastern thought on a Western soil.
Epicurus, on the other hand, has an echo of the native ring. . . .
The Message of Greece. 203
of opposite quality. Strife demands opposition; it
demands a sense of diſficulty on the part of the
combatant. The Greek reverenced the powers of
nature and the powers of mind more from their
aspect of imperfection than from their semblance
of completeness; he loved them because they seemed
...to make their way through opposing clouds and re-
tarding storms. It is by this that I explain the
strange combinations of thought that meet in his
worship, the number of dissimilar things that dwell
side by side in his temple. He puts them side by
side, that out of their contrast there may come con-
flict, and that out of their conflict there may arise
the ideal which he loves. Let me try to illustrate
this. * -
One of the most prominent objects of worship
in ancient Greece is Apollo. In later times he is
the sun-god, but this was a light into which he
grew." Apollo became the sun as a reward for
work done on the earthly plane. That work was
the service of man. He is from the beginning the
representative of ideal humanity, the embodiment
of all that is pure and noble in the human spirit.
He is to the mind of Greece what the names of
the canonised are to the mind of Medievalism—a
symbol of the Saintly life. It is this purifying
power which is sought to be indicated when he is
* * In the Homeric poems Apollo is viewed as quite distinct from
...the sun-god ; see, for example, the opening of the ‘Iliad.’
204 Messages of the Old Religions.
called the god of medicine—the restorer and pre-
server of that physical health which has so much
to do with the health of the soul. Apollo stands
for the perfect man, the man unspotted by the
world. But then, side by side with this picture,
there is another and a different one, and the two
are made to blend together. Apollo is the Saintly
man, but he is at the same time the gay man. He
is unspotted by the world, but he is also at the
very heart of the world. Pure himself, he holds
in his hand everything that is supposed to be a
temptation against purity. He has the hot blood
of youth in his veins; his mildness is not the result
of a cool temperament, but dwells beside a river of
rushing passion. He is always represented with a
bow and with a lyre. It is intended to mark the
fact that he is the embodiment at Once of the
martial and the musical. He is the leader of men
in the ranks of war, and he is the delight of men
in the ranks of peace. He supplies at once the
sources of physical strength and the means of
social enjoyment. These are elements not com-
monly associated with the Saintly life; they are
supposed to furnish incentives to temptation, seduc-
tions from the path of that life. Why, then, are
they associated here ? Is not the reason plain 2.
Is it not clear that the Greek put these temptations
into the hand of Apollo just because they were
temptations, just because they supplied an oppor-
The Message of Greece. 205
tunity for that struggle in which the Greek above
all things delighted When he invests the pure.
man with the bow and with the lyre, it is because.
he wants purity to be not an empty thing, not the
result of mere mental vacancy or of simple inanity,
but the product of a deliberate choice and the fruit
of a determinate struggle. The Greek has been
here true to himself, true to his country, true to
his national ideal. He has given Apollo the wreath
of purity because he has won that wreath by con-
quest. He has worshipped his unspottedness be-
cause it has been an unspottedness where spots
might have been—a whiteness which has remained
uncontaminated amidst conditions and amidst en-
vironments in which the incurring of contamination
seemed almost a necessary thing.
Again. If Apollo was the Greek's ideal of man-
hood, Artemis was his ideal of womanhood. In
fixing upon Artemis as his type of womanhood, the
Greek has done honour to himself. Artemis is the
representative of chastity. Out of all the possible.
excellences which are associated with the name of
woman, he has selected this one as the most glorious
and the most desirable one. He has passed by his
own natural predilection for the beautiful; he has
subordinated his instinctive tendency to give prom-
inence to the symmetry of form ; he has made
selection of a quality which is of all qualities
the least distinctive of his race, and has thereby
206. Messages of the Old Religions.
indicated an aspiration beyond his own environ-
ment. When the Greek crowned woman with thes
wreath of divinity, he encircled her head with that
laurel which he deemed the most precious, and
which doubtless was to him the most precious,
because amongst the actual women of his land it
was the most rare. He proclaimed the divineness
of chastity, because chastity was as yet the most
transcendental thing, the thing most removed from
positive experience. But here again we are con-
fronted by a remarkable combination. Artemis is
the representative of chaste womanhood, but she
is not the representative of ascetic womanhood. If
she is crowned as the goddess of chastity, she is
also crowned as the goddess of the chase. To her
belongs the pleasure of the hunting-field — the
exercise of limb and the strength of arm. She
incarnates in herself all that is manly in sport, all
that is vigorous in pastime. She incorporates in
her nature the attributes of the other sex along
with the distinctive qualities of her own. She is
beautiful in feature but not gentle in expression,
graceful in form but not feminine in mould; she is
the woman in the man. And here again, can one
fail to recognise the deep meaning that underlies
the picture ? Why has the Greek made the goddess
of chastity the goddess of the chase ? Clearly that
through the chase he may give more value to the
chastity. He wants the chasteness of Artemis, like
The Message of Greece. 207
the pureness of Apollo, not to be the result of an
empty heart nor the product of a shallow life, but
to be the expression of a nature which has known
both sides of the question, and which adheres to
virtue because it has made a deliberate choice. He
wants it to be an abstinence which springs not from
the fact that she has been immured in cloistered
cell or hid from the temptations of the passing
hour, but from the depth of a conviction that has
come from worldly experience, and arrived at its
determination by weighing the alternatives on either
side. The Greek has been led to deify two natures
in one person through his own admiration for
struggle, through his consciousness that virtue is
only beautiful when it stands out in contrast with
that which would seduce it.
I shall give yet another illustration, because it is
one which is deep and far-reaching. Let us take
that god whom the Greeks called Hephaistos, and
the Romans Vulcan. He is the god of fire, the
maker of war-instruments, the man who forges the
thunderbolts for Jove. Yet this herculean labour
has to be performed by an imperfect body. Vul-
can is both lame and deformed, and his movements
are naturally slow ; he is represented in himself as
an object of laughter to the gods. The problem
is why such a conception should have been deified
and worshipped by man, specially why such a con-
ception should have been deified and worshipped
208 Messages of the Old Religions.
by the Greek. In later times the Greek did not
scruple to invest the objects of his worship with
human passions and mental weaknesses, and this
has always seemed a marvel. Dut, to my mind the
earlier fact is far more marvellous—that the Greek
should have reverenced a being whom he had in-
vested with bodily defects. Let us remember what
was to him the highest manifestation of life's glory;
it was the exhibition of the beautiful in nature, in
art, in man. Beauty was to the Greek the Alpha
and the Omega, the beginning and the end of all
perfection. There was no flaw to him like a flaw
against symmetry; there was no error to him like an
error against taste. One would have expected that
wherever he had an object of worship, and what-
ever might be the endowments of that object, he
would at least have invested it with an ample
measure of beauty. Very startling therefore is it
when we find him reverencing a being in whom
there is no form nor comeliness, bowing down
before a presence in whose outward aspect are the
marks of an image more marred than the Sons of
men. How are we to account for this 2 How are
we to explain the fact that the beauty-loving Greek
has deserted his own ideal of beauty—that the man
who habitually reverences above all things the
symmetry of form, should have yielded his adora-
tion to that which is distinguished for its want of
symmetry - -
The Message of Greece. 209
The reason again is plain. It is because the
Greek in his deepest nature is an athlete. He
values a possession in proportion as that possession
has been won. Even beauty would not be valuable
to him if it were the rule and not the exception.
It is the fact that, in the struggle for existence,
Some forms have been able to maintain not only
their existence but their symmetry, which makes the
possession of that symmetry to him a joy; the beau-
tiful itself is only accepted as a road to the strong.
In this light Vulcan's position becomes clear. There
has fallen to him a herculean work to do; he has
to forge those bolts of fire which shall execute the
mandates of the universe. What more natural than
that the Greek should make it more herculean still,
should exaggerate the difficulty, to lend more glory
to the strength ? Accordingly he has done so. He
has made the god of fire and of the thunderbolt
a god with bodily defects; he has invested him
with lameness and with the elements of physical
imperfection. He has so invested him that he may
magnify the execution of his task, that he may
exhibit in more strong relief the greatness of his
actually exerted power. Some worshippers would
have ſeverenced the object of their worship in
proportion as it found all things easy; the Greek
bestows his reverence on the opposite ground. To
him the glory of life, even of divine life, is its
struggle. The powers of nature are reverenced by
()
210 Messages of the Old Religions.
him because they are athletic powers—forces which
act and react upon each other, and which keep their
place by conflict. Whatever emphasises the con-
flict, whatever intensifies the obstacle, is prized and
appropriated as a means to the ultimate effect, and
is permitted even to share by anticipation in that
glory which the ultimate effect shall secure.
I cannot but direct attention to the remarkable an-
alogy which in this respect the mythology of ancient
Greece bears to a system which is generally held to
be, and which in many respects is, its contrast—the
religion of Jesus Christ. If one were asked to put his
and upon that form of belief which of all others is
ost foreign to Christianity, he would probably select
the Hellenic worship of nature. And yet it is in this
Hellenic worship of nature that we find the germ of
that which in Christianity appears in full development
—the glorification of weakness. The sensuous Greek
and the self-sacrificing Christian have alike distin-
guished themselves from other forms of faith by in-
corporating in their Pantheon the shadows of human
life; to the one, as to the other, weakness is a condi-
tion of strength. No doubt there is a vast difference
in their respective reasons for this. The Greek in-
corporates weakness in his Pantheon in order that
he may lend to him who overcomes it a larger meed
of praise. The Christian admits weakness into his
Bavilion for precisely the opposite reason—in order
that the man who strives may be taught the lesson



The Message of Greece. 211
of his own nothingness. Yet, when we look deeper,
it may perhaps be found that these two views are
not so discordant as they seem ; that there is at
least a point in which for a moment they find a
meeting-place. The Greek magnifies strength, and
the Christian magnifies humility; but does not the
Christian magnify humility as an ultimate source
of strength ? Is it not because he sees in self-
forgetfulness the road to self-enlargement, because
he recognises in the spirit of sacrifice the promise
and potence of life, that he insists before all things
on the soul becoming unconscious of itself? Is
not weakness here also contemplated as a means of
struggle, and crowned as a road to victory ! Thus
strangely do these two forms of faith, so different
in their origin and so divergent in their general
aspects, exhibit at one corner an attitude of con-
cord and alliance — an attitude which may have
found its ultimate realisation in that singular union
of the son of Abraham with the son of Hellas which
marked the close of the Jewish Theocracy, and con-
stituted the dawn of the Christian day.
And if the Greek mythology presents a point of
union with Christian thought, it presents equally a
point of union with thaf which at first sight seems
more pronouncedly its opposite than the religion of
Jesus; I mean the speculations of modern Science. If
there are two things which at the outset appear irre-
concilable, they are the dreams of the ancient Greek
212 Messages of the Old Religions.
and the conclusions of the modern evolutionist.
The one stands at the beginning, and the other
at the close of human development. And yet in
the optimism of ancient Greece, there is something
which finds an analogy with the speculations of
modern evolution. As the morning is more like
the evening than any other part of the day, so the
earliest phase of humanity resembles its latest mani-
festation more than its intermediate phases. Modern
science is on the whole optimistic. It believes that
the development of man is an upward development,
and that when the creature is fully adjusted to his
environment he will find peace. But this ultimate
optimism of modern science implies much more; it
implies that every step of the process has been a
step in the right direction — in the direction of
the goal. If ever the time should come in which
the millennial age of the modern scientist shall be
reached, he himself will be the first to proclaim
that it has been reached by the accumulation and
combination of all the events which have preceded
it—prosperous and adverse, good and bad. He will
tell the world of his day that the prosperity to
which men have attained has been simply the last
result of the whole foregoing panorama, the ultimate
issue of that long train of circumstances which is
called the course of time. He will make no dis-
tinction in his retrospective survey between the
defects and the symmetries of nature. The defects
The Message of Greece. 213
will themselves appear in the light of symmetries,
because to the eye of the scientist they shall appear
as workers in the building. Every step of the
preceding evolution shall be found to have been a
necessary step to the production of the actual goal.
The absence of aught which seemed a blemish, the
leaving out of anything which was called a defect,
shall be regarded by him as an impossible concep-
tion. He will be constrained to say in scientific
retrospect what an apostle said in religious faith—
that all things have worked together for good. If
modern Science is optimistic at all, it must be opti-
mistic all through. It cannot be hopeful about the
whole without being sanguine about the part, for the
very marrow of its doctrine is the belief that the
whole is involved in the part. It cannot be opti-
mistic regarding the future without being optimis-
tic in relation to the passing hour, for it is itself
based on the principle that the future sleeps in
the present, and that the passing hour enfolds the
germ of the completed day."
And, to tell this was the message of Greece. That
she told it in rough language is true ; that she
expressed herself very badly is undoubted; but be-
neath the grotesqueness of the form there abides the
Spirit of that truth which she meant to convey. It
is a truth unique amongst the messages of religions.
* All this is conceded even by such a negative writer as Lange in
his ‘History of Materialism.’
214 Messages of the Old Religions.
Hitherto the creeds of men had deified the objects
of life after having lifted them out of life; they
first idealised them and then crowned them. But
here the objects of life are crowned without being
idealised; they are crowned as they are—in all their
present forms, and with all their present imperfec-
tions. The Greek has put his hand upon the world
as it is—struggling, commonplace, unfinished. He
has uncovered his head before the aspect of nature
which meets him every day, before the events which
befall him every hour, and he has not scrupled to
assign divinity to the images of creation as they
actually float before him. In so doing, he has sup-
plied a desideratum in the objects of religious wor-
ship. Religious worship had deified everything but
the common day. It had deified the past in China;
it had deified the future in Persia; it had deified
even the hour of death in the Buddhism of India;
but it had put no crown upon the objects and the
events of the living hour. It was reserved for Greece
to supply the want in the temple of humanity, and
by this she, being dead, yet speaketh. ---
The Message of Rome. 215
CHAPTER X.
THE MESSAGE OF ROME.
I REGARD the Roman religion as the earliest attempt
at religious union. Its distinctive message to the
world was to proclaim the possibility of destroying
the distinctive, of erasing those lines of demarca-
tion which tend to divide the faiths of men. From
the very beginning, from the very constitution of
her nature, Rome Sought a principle of eclecticism—
a principle which should unite and rivet the lives of
the multitude. In every department of her history
she pursued the same end ; her religious instinct
Only moved in unison with her national reason. As
surely as on the life of the bee there is imprinted
the necessity to construct an incorporative hive,
there was from the outset imprinted on the Roman
constituliull the necessity to construct an incorpo-
rative empire—an empire which in its extent and
its vastness might yet leave room for the action of
many powers within it. The unity at which Rome
aimed was not a uniformity. She did not seek
216 Messages of the Old Religions.
merely to compress the nations by conquest under
her own Sceptre. She was perfectly willing—nay,
earnestly desirous—that the nations should not be
compressed, that her conquests should be of such a
nature as to leave them in a measure free. She
wanted an empire whose glory should consist in
holding other empires within it, as a drop of water
holds within it a multitude of separate lives. Her
political aim was unity, and unity is ever the com-
bination, not the destruction, of the many. Her
whole history, with all its changes, is an effort to
conserve in the new the elements of the old. When
Augustus aimed at undivided empire, he aimed at
it in the Roman method; he did not break with the
institutions of the past, but gathered them around his
own person." It is but an instance in miniature of
what Rome sought to do in the gross. She was
willing to permit the institutions of the world to re-
main; she only asked that they would assume her
OWI). Ila, Iſle.
Now, the Roman religion follows the plan of the
Roman politics; strictly speaking, it is but a part
Of those politics. It never aspires to originality; it
would scarcely be too much to say that it aspires to
be not original. Originality would have destroyed
the Roman design. The Roman design in every
sphere was incorporation. Incorporation demands
1 See this point very clearly stated in Dean Merivale's article
“Augustus,” “Encyclopædia Britannica,’ ninth edition.
The M.essage of Rome. 217
eclecticism—the selecting of that which is best in
surrounding systems. Rome's eagerness to incor-
porate made her unwilling to be originative. She
was too anxious to gather in the old to be a founder
of the new. Her aim was to find a meeting-place
for the creeds of the nations. Books on popular
Church history have often been misled as to her
character by her attitude to Christianity. Viewing
her in that attitude, they have represented her as a
persecuting power. The truth is, it was the nature
of Christianity and not the nature of Rome which
gave rise to persecutions. Rome would have toler-
ated any religion which would consent to nestle
under her banner. But this Christianity would not
consent to do. Christianity claimed exactly what
Rome claimed—to be the wide-spreading tree upon
whose branches all other faiths might rest. She
claimed to be the principle of union which formed
a possible nucleus for the reconciliation of rival be-
liefs. She claimed to have been herself the uncon-
scious source of all other aspirations—the light which
had lighted the worship of every man. Christianity,
therefore, could never have accepted the terms of
the Roman Pantheon, could never have consented to
serve in a house where she asserted the right to rule.
Her distinctive characteristic was that she refused
to be tolerated, insisted to be recognised alone and
Supreme. She brooked no rival, and she would
admit no Second; she demanded, like Rome herself,
218 Messages of the Old Religions.
the suffrages of all other faiths. It is unfair, there-
fore, to regard Rome's attitude towards Christianity
as an exception to her usual policy. She was as
willing to extend her toleration to Christianity as
to any other creed, and she only exchanged her tol-
eration for hostility because Christianity refused to
tolerate her. -
The result of this eclecticism is that the religion
of Rome exhibits not one but many elements. Just
as within her body politic there repose side by side
the characteristics of many lands, so within the
membership of her religious system there sleep the
phases of many faiths. Rome brings no new mes-
Sage into the world; her mission is to collect, and,
if possible, to combine, those messages which the
world has already received. Accordingly, the faith
of Tome is a many-sided faith; it would have been
universally sided if every aspect of religion had in
its day been represented. It took whatever it found.
It gathered stones from all Surrounding temples, and
out of these it built a temple of its own—a temple
not very symmetrical indeed, not very harmoniously
welded nor aptly adjusted, yet exhibiting a faithful
and honest attempt to find in one Pantheon a place
for many minds. Let us look at one or two of the
different sides of this religion, y
It has one aspect in which it bears a resemblance
to the faith of Judea. Whence that resemblance or-
iginates we cannot tell, but it is highly probable that
The Message of Rome. 219
the far-travelling and eagerly incorporating spirit
of Rome came at an early date into contact with
Judaic forms of thought." Be this as it may, it is
certain that in Rome, as in Judea, we find the union
of two tendencies which, so far as I know, are in
no other faith found combined — the tendency to
dwell in the past, and the impulse to push forward
into the future. China has exhibited the one, and
Parsism has revealed the other; but it has been
reserved for Judea and Rome alone to find a meet-
ing-place for both. In Rome, as in Judea, we see
hands stretched out in opposite directions — one
pointing backward to the gates of a golden para-
dise, the other pointing forward to the gates of a
future kingdom. In the one, as in the other, we
behold the spectacle of a mind divided between
the pride of a high origin and the expectation of
a lofty destiny, vibrating between a glory which
has been and a splendour which is coming. If
Judea goes back to her Eden, Rome goes back to
her Troy; if Judea looks forward to her Messiah,
Rome looks forward to her universal dominion.
The actual life of each is bounded by two paradises
—the glory of a lofty ancestry and the glory of
an omnipotent posterify. And in the life of each
* Renan says that it is probable Judaic thought would reach Rome
earlier than even nearer parts of the empire. See his ‘Influence
of the Institutions, Thought, and Culture of Rome on Christianity
and the Development of the Catholic Church,” Hibbert Lecture,
1880.
220 Messages of the Old Religions.
the power which mediates between the one and the
other is the power of law. In Judea and in Rome
alike, the minds of men are developed from the para-
dise of the past into the paradise of the future by a
colossal system of jurisprudence, by which the will
of each man is subjugated, and the will of each
adjusted to the will of all—a jurisprudence which
in both cases has left upon the ages an everlasting
impress, and has exerted a permanent influence upon
institutions and civilisations foreign to its own.
It will be seen from this that at the root of the
Roman religion there lies an element not com-
monly found in the faiths of the pre - Christian
world—the element of morality. In Rome, as in
Judea, the conception of law is an ethical concep-
tion; it is founded on the reciprocal duties of man
to man, and on the duties of all to the body politic.
The result is that in the early stages of her history
the religion of Rome exhibits, as Mommsen remarks,
Jaspect of great seriousness." It is unlike other
systems of Polytheism in the solemnity with which
it approaches the problems of life. If it deifies the
powers of nature, it does so not on the ground of
their contribution to sensuous joy, but on the ground
of their possible service to humanity. The object of
the Roman's reverence, like the object of the Jew’s
1 Mommsen, indeed, shows how, afterwards, the corruption of the
Roman mind destroyed this primitive reverence. See his ‘Itome,’
book iii. chap. xiii.
The Message of Rome. 221
reverence, is that collection of individuals compre-
hended under the name of the State. Everything
which is worshipped by him is worshipped by reason
of, and in proportion to, its service to the common-
wealth. The conceptions of Church and State are
not two conceptions, but one; the life of politics is
identified with the life of piety. The good citizen
and the good man are synonymous terms. There
is no difference between treason and sacrilege, no,
separation between sin and crime. The man who
violates the law of his country has violated thereby
the divine law, and his expiation to the law of his
country is accepted as an expiation to the law of
heaven. And because the Roman reverenced the
State, he reverenced also the family; here again
emerges his resemblance to the Jew. Every family
was viewed as a state in miniature, an image or
simulacrum of that great commonwealth of which it
was a part, and whose laws it was bound to mirror.
The word piety, which receives its origin from him,
means originally the affection of a son for a father,
the devotion of a member to the head of a family.
The derivation is significant. It shows that in the
mind of the Roman the idea not only of religion but
of morality was inseparahle from the State, insep-
arable from the relation of the subordinate to the
superior. And it is highly significant of this fact
that the word “patriotism,” which is also derived
from him, means by etymology the love of country
222 Messages of the Old Religions.
viewed as a family and a home. It was because the
Roman and the Jew reverenced equally the origin
and the climax of things, that they each found a
place in their system both for the family and for
the nation. The family represented the small be-
ginning, the stream out of which the nation rose;
the nation represented the family completed, the
perfect development of the individual household.
But if Rome had one aspect turned towards Judea,
she had another side turned towards the natural
opposite of Judea — Greece. From Greece Rome
borrowed wholesale. She conquered Greece by
arms, but she allowed Greece to conquer her by
peace. She took the Hellenic gods into her Pan-
theon and bowed down before them. She changed
their names, indeed; she called Zeus Jupiter, and
Poseidon Neptune, and Ares Mars, and Athene
Minerva. Along with their names she changed also
much of their garments; she stripped them of their
beautiful and poetic dress, and clothed them in
commonplace and prosaic attire. But when all was
said and done, they were still the old gods; they
were reduced in personality, but they preserved their
original function. Now, this is one of the hetero-
genous things in the Roman system. We should
have expected that a religion which started from the
basis of morality and reverenced the abstraction of
law, would have lifted up its eyes to an abstract and
invisible Lawgiver. This was what Judea did, and
The Message of Rome. 223
in this Judea was consistent. But Rome was con-
tent to be inconsistent. What she wanted was union
—a principle of co-operation amongst the nations, of
which she herself would be the centre. To secure
this she was willing to pay any price—to sacrifice
Iogic, consistency, symmetry. If the stones of other
temples were content to be incorporated in her
Pantheon, she on her part was willing to receive
them without perfect cement. Accordingly, she took
the gods of Greece as they were—the personifica-
tions of the forces of a world existing in a state of
struggle. It was for a state of struggle that she
wanted them. Her problem was not how to reach
a higher life, but how to make the best of this life.
She did not desire the minds of her citizens to be
centred on the things above; she wished them to be
fixed on the things below. She desired that they
should reverence the empire itself, that their religion
should be bounded by the length and the breadth,
the height and the depth of its possibilities. She
sought the aid of no gods with any other end than
this. If they did not minister to the needs of the
empire, there was no other need to which she wished
them to minister. Her very morality was a utilitarian
morality. Lofty as it was in its aspirings, and severe
as it was in its requirements, it was, still, ever con-
templated as a means and not an end. If the Roman
was to be courageous, it was because he belonged to
a military nation. If he was to be just, it was
224 Messages of the Old Religions.
because he was only one member of a vast empire
where vastness could not be preserved without the
perfect adjustment of all its parts. The empire itself
was the real object of his reverence, and nothing else
was reverenced except in So far as it ministered to
this. In incorporating the gods of Greece, he was
mainly influenced by the fact that the gods of Greece
were no transcendental product. He was attracted by
their earthliness. He was impelled to receive them,
because he saw that they did not set up a high
standard, did not profess to represent perfection.
He perceived that their worship would not lift the
national mind out of its nation ality, would not draw
it away from the contemplation of mundane things,
specially from the contemplation of imperial inter-
ests. Himself of an unpoetic nature, and more prone
to reverence the strong than the beautiful, he was
willing to recognise these forms of aesthetic beauty,
provided they would consent to favour the growth of
his power.
But here there arises a third aspect of the Roman
religion, and one in which it differs essentially from
either of the two foregoing. I have said that the
main end of Roman morality was the service of the
empire. In this service, however, there was de-
manded, when occasion required, a readiness for the
sacrifice of life which can nowhere else be found out
of India. Materialistic and utilitarian as is the
Roman genius, there is blended with it an element
The Message of Rome. 225
which originally had its source in that which is the
reverse of materialism and the opposite of utilitarian
—the element of Buddhism. Tiving, as he does, for
this world in its most external aspect and its most
mundane interests, the Roman, in the earlier stages
of his history, is prepared, in the defence of these
interests, to exhibit a sacrifice which is purely un-
worldly, and a self-surrender which is distinctly
spiritual. One has only to read the pages of his
opening story in order to be impressed with the fact
that, from whatever source it has come, there has
entered into his religion a breath of Indian worship.
Mythical as in most of its parts that early story is,
its very mythology reveals the presence and the in-
fluence of this thought of Self-abnegation. Again
and again we are confronted by the spectacle of a
man sacrificing himself for his country, offering up
his own life to appease that wrath of the gods which
is supposed to have brought calamity upon the for-
tunes of his native land. Such stories would not be
told if the ideal of heroism which they teach did not
exist in the national mind. The very word religion,
which is a word derived from Rome, implies in its
most probable etymology" that a man's primary duty
is self-sacrifice. Tf signifies a binding back, a re-
* The etymology I refer to is that which derives it from religare.
See Augustin, De Civitate Dei, x. 3, edit. of Benedictines, Paris,
1838; and Lactantius, Insti. Div., iv. 28. Cicero, however,
derives it from religere (Nat. Deor., ii. 28).
P
226 Messages of the Old Religions.
straint of the individual life. Each man is viewed
as a victim bound to an altar of sacrifice. His being
is offered up not really to the gods but to the State;
the office of the gods is simply to approve and to
reward. The man is at all times called upon to:
regard himself as a possible sacrifice to his country's
good, as one who may at any moment be required to
become an expiation for some national sin. It is
highly significant that when a great Christian teacher
wanted to exhibit Christianity as an atonement of
the one for the guilt of the many, he embodied his
view in an epistle to the Romans. He could not
have sent it to a better quarter, nor to a quarter more
likely to appreciate it. The Jew had no adequate
sense of what was required from the individual man;
he offered animal sacrifices for the wellbeing of the
theocratic kingdom. The Toman in this respect saw
deeper. He saw that if a kingdom of heaven was to
be reached on earth, it must be reached through the
surrender of each for all, through the willingness of
every individual to give himself up for the whole.
This was not Jewish, but it was Indian. It was a
practical manifestation of Buddhism with the old
intensity but with a new motive. It was no longer
a sacrifice for the sake of death; its aim was the
conservation and intensification of the national life.
Yet it sought its end by the old means—the Bud-
dhist means. It called upon the individual to Sur-
render at the outset all individual desires, to give up
The Message of Rome. 227
his own personality, to resign his own interests. It
called upon him to view himself only as one member
of a vast body, and a member which ought to be am-
putated if the wants of the body required it. It
incorporated with Western civilisation a breath of
the Eastern day, and united to the activity of Europe
the passive sacrificialness of Asia.
Nor in this wondrous Pantheon which thus sought
to collect the varied thoughts of men, was there alto-
gether wanting a place for Parsism. It is the last
form of thought which we should have expected to
have had a place there. Parsism started Originally
from exactly the opposite basis. The earliest vision
of Rome was a vision of unity; the earliest vision
of Persia was a vision of duality. Rome from the
outset beheld the prospect of a world gathered around
one centre; Persia began by Seeing the impossibility
of a common centre. One would have thought that
a form of faith which saw in this world an empire
divided between two, could never have been incor-
porated in a creed which proclaimed an empire
governed by one only. Yet in the Creed of Rome
there is found such an incorporation. It comes out
with great prominence in its doctrine of good and
evil geniuses—in the belief that families and indi-
viduals may be advanced or retarded by the patron-
age or by the opposition of some spiritual power.
Just as in the Persian hierarchy there were angels
that fought for Ormuzd and angels that strove for
228 Messages of the Old Religions.
Ahriman, so in the popular mythology of Rome there
were spirits which aided the life and there were
spirits which impeded its progress. The medieval
doctrine of guardian angels on the one hand and of
besetting demons on the other, has its parentage in
classic and pagan Soil; it is a survival of that Roman
culture in the midst of which Western Christianity
has its cradle. That Rome took it from Persia. I do
not believe; but she took it from a phase of human
nature which Persia made her own. She adopted
it through her eclectic tendency to give a place to
everything, to find room in her constitution for all
forms of man. Nor was there wanting an element
in her nature which made even this phase of faith
in some sense congenial, Rome from the outset
felt that her mission was conquest, that the unity
to which she aspired could only be purchased by
struggle. It was not wholly inappropriate that the
struggle which she experienced in politics should be
accepted also in the realm of Spirit, and that the
battle between strength and weakness should be
accompanied by the strife between the powers of
good and evil.
I have given these illustrations merely as speci-
mens, as representative instances of that great prin-
ciple on which the Roman constitution acted. That
principle was one of incorporative union. The mes-
sage of Rome to the religious world was essentially
a message of peace. It sought to put an end to all
The Message of Rome. 229
clashings by allowing room for the co-existence of
contrary tendencies, whether these tendencies be-
longed to the world of politics or to the sphere of
religion. As in the world of politics it gave per-
mission to the existence of empires within the
empire, in the sphere of religion it gave permission
to the existence of faiths within the faith. The
one great faith of Rome was the belief in her own
destiny, the maintaining and enlarging of her-
self. She was willing to incorporate within her
temple every shrine that would favour such an end.
The hond of unity which she sought between the
different religions of men was the bond of a com-
mon devotion to the political interests of the empire.
Hers is the earliest attempt to reach an evangeli-
cal alliance in the etymological sense of that ex-
pression, — to promulgate a message which shall
furnish a meeting-place for the messages of †—t
faiths. This is the true significance of the Roman
religion, the Secret of its protracted stability, and *
the cause of its long success. Yet it has not been
ultimately successful; its attempt at union has
eventually proved a failure. With the destruction
of Rome's political fabric, the shrines incorporated
within lier temple have again been Scwored. The
unity of faith which she has sought to secure has
melted as utterly as the unity of empire which
she actually established, and the fall of the One
has been contemporaneous with the fall of the
230 Messages of the Old Religions.
other. The question is; Why? What is the reason
that the earliest attempt at religious union, based
as it was on such a broad foundation, and con-
ducted on such a princely scale, has proved in the
long-run so entirely abortive 2 Why is it that an
effort SO persistently planned, and for a time so
brilliantly achieved, has left behind it even fewer
traces of its influence than those which survive of
the effort at political unity ? The answer to a ques-
tion SO suggestive and so practical demands the con-
sideration of a separate chapter,
The Message of Rome, 231
CHAPTER XI.
THE SUBJECT CONTINUED,
THE peculiarity of the Roman religion does not lie
in its identification with State interests; this is an
attribute which it shares in general with the whole
ancient world." What distinguishes the religion of
Rome from Surrounding and from past religions, is
its effort to construct a universal Church by the
formation of a universal State. Of course, in the
old régime, the former was inevitably involved in
the latter ; if State and Church were one, the
securing of a universal dominion was the Securing
of a universal Church. The peculiarity of the
Roman worship lies in the fact that it did secure
an absolute dominion by becoming the worship of
an absolute State. And it is out of this fact that
the great problem ariscs, Why has it failed ? If
it had not succeeded in its aim, there would be no
* Canon Westcott points out that the history of the Gentile
world exhibits a gradual process of the secularising of religion
(“Gospel of the Resurrection,’ 2d edit., chap. i., xxxiv.).
232 Messages of the Old Religions.
room for wonder; but having succeeded, why has it
proved abortive 2 The idea at which Rome aimed
is by no means an obsolete idea; on the contrary,
it is one of the most modern things in ancient
history. The conception of a civic Church, of a
Church which shall regulate its membership not
by creed but by character, not by services done
for the sanctuary but by duties done for man, is
one that, with the advance of civilisation, has more
and more been coming to the front. In countries
holding the Protestant principle, it has been espe-
cially and increasingly powerful, and it finds in
modern England a growing number of advocates."
It is distinctively a Western conception, and it had
its home and origin in the West — in that great
empire which sought to embrace the world. What
is the reason that, as devised and promulgated by
this empire, the scheme has proved so illusory ! Why
has the most gigantic effort to promote it been the
most conspicuous for its failure ?
In inquiring into a subject of this kind, the first
question ought to be a consideration of the formula
under which it is proposed to compass religious
union. All religious union must be on the ground
of some formula. Rome's formula I would express
1 I find, for example, this view advocated by Mr W. T. Stead in
an article entitled “The Civic Church,” in a periodical styled
‘Help,' supplement to the “Review of Reviews,” March 1892, vol.
ii., No. 3.
The Message of Rome. 233
thus, “Whatever gods exist, exist for the sake of the
Boman State.” It mattered not whether they actu-
ally existed, provided that those who believed in
them would recognise them as patrons of the gov-
ernment. Now, I concede at the outset that this
formula has an advantage over most other formulas,
both ancient and modern ; it is based not on the
recognition of a fact but on the expression of a
desire. The Roman creed is virtually a prayer; it
unites men by the subscription to one article—
the obligation to aspire towards the wellbeing of
the republic. I have always felt that if ever a
creed shall be formed which shall obtain universal
suffrage, it shall be on such a basis—the basis of
a common prayer. I have sometimes imagined that,
a subscription to the Lord's Prayer would consti-
tute a point of union not only for all Christians,
but for some who are popularly regarded as outside
the pale of Christianity. It seems to me that the
Roman formula constitutes the only deliberate at-
tempt which has been made in the direction of a
creed based on aspiration, and it is probably to
this that it owes what measure of success it has
attained. The question remains why it has not
boon successful throughout. The principle of the
formula is good and makes for union; why has it
not achieved union ? Clearly there must be some-
thing defective in the formula itself, something
which has nullified or weakened the force of the
234 Messages of the Old Religions.
aspiration. A moment's consideration will show us
that it is here where the vitiating element lies.
The object contemplated by Roman religion is the
identification of the Church with the State. It aspires
to make the religious duty of man coincident with
his political duty. The question is, If such a union
were perfected in all the members of the body politic,
would it amount to a religion of humanity ? And
the answer must be, No ; it is exactly here that
the religion of Rome has failed in its design. It
would have been a very different matter if Rome
had contemplated the identification of the State
with the Church,--if she had said that every man,
by reason of the act of worship, was entitled to
political privileges. But when she said that the
Church was to be identified with the State, she
really limited the Church. The State as under-
stood by Rome was not coextensive with the Church
as understood by Christianity. The Church as un-
derstood by Christianity comprehends every man
who is willing to recognise his own weakness;
the State as understood by Rome comprehended
only those men who were able to exercise certain
political powers. Accordingly, when Rome made the
Church identical with the State, she really cut off
from religious membership a vast Section of human-
ity. There were in the Roman empire, there are in
every empire under heaven, a multitude of human
beings who have no relation to the State except that
The Message of Rome. 235
of hindrance—who are simply a blot and a barrier
upon the constitution and the progress of the body,
politic. In modern life it is generally conceded that
it is the duty of the State to care for these ; but
the very statement implies that they are a drag
upon the wheels of the social fabric, that they con-
stitute one of the elements which prevent any State
from being a perfect government. There are those
who are so defective in body as to be incapable of
bearing their part in the conflict of life. There are
those who are so defective in intellect as to be in-
capable of realising what it is to be in conflict.
There are those who are so defective in morality
that they are led to the commission of crime with
an instinct seemingly as unerring as that by which
the bee is led to the construction of its hive. No
one will maintain that these are members of a State
as such ; no one will contend that they are anything
less than a retardation of the political mechanism.
If, therefore, the Church be identified with the State,
it logically follows that the Church is to be barri-
caded from a large section, and that the most needy
section, of humanity.
Rome saw the logical consequence, and she did
not shrink from it. It was in her power to have
altered or relaxed her formula; she preferred to
abide by it, and to accept the inevitable conclusion.
That conclusion was the sternest imaginable; it
practically consigned to oblivion some millions of
236 Messages of the Old Religions,
the human race. The mentally and bodily defec-
tive were no aid to the movement of State mechan-
ism. Rome said, “Let them be taken out of the
way.” She not only said it, but up to her power
she did it. She laboured by every means to sup-
press incompetents. She had not found the secret
of suppressing their incompetency; the shortest and
easiest method she knew was to annihilate them.
She sought to lay the axe to the root of the tree.
She recommended infanticide in cases of deformity,
desertion of infants in cases of hopeless destitution.
She exposed the life of the slave to the sword of the
gladiator. She inculcated as a doctrine of moral
heroism the practice of suicide when any life was
too hard to bear. She left unprovided those forms
of mental alienation which, because they are not
seen on the surface and not recognised in the first
stage of development, were allowed to escape the
remedy of infanticide.
These blots on the Roman constitution are popu-
larly regarded as a sign of the low religious life to
which the old world had sunk, a sign of how little
power the religion of the empire really possessed
to influence the lives of its members. And yet a
moment's reflection should convince us that this is
not the legitimate conclusion. It certainly proves
that the religion of the empire was a form of faith
very defective in theory and very inadequate in
scope; but it does not prove that it was a form
The Message of Rome. 237
of faith which had lost its practical influence. The
conclusion is exactly the contrary. It was not by
a fall from its religious principle that Rome became
neglectful of the maimed masses of Society; it was
precisely by the carrying out of its religious prin-
ciple. Rome neglected the maimed bodies in the
State because her principle of religion taught her to
regard these as no part of the State. She was never
more religious than in the cold eye she turned towards
the halt and the blind. It was no impulse of impiety
which prompted her to pass these by on the other
side, which induced her to seek for their elimina-
tion and extermination. It would hardly be too
much to say that in her neglect, and even in her
seeming cruelty, she acted under the impulse of
religion, under the impulse of that faith which she
had made her own. Her ideal was empire; her
worship was the reverence of empire; her religion
was the service of empire. To her the good citizen
and the pious devotee were one. The religious duty
of every man was to support those influences which
made for the welfare of the State; it was equally
his duty to discourage and to suppress those influ-
ences which impeded the welfare of the State. In
his efforts to eliminate hindrances, in his attempts
to extinguish incompetents, in his measures to re-
press the multiplication of those noxious or useless
growths which interfered with the life of the col-
lective body, he might well on his principles believe
—f
238 Messages of the Old Religions.
that he was doing piety good service. The error of
Rome must be sought, not in her unfaithfulness to
her religious ideal, but in the defectiveness of that
ideal itself. The object of her reverence was not
being but force, not existence but energy, not thought
but action. She valued everything for what it could
do, measured everything by its dynamical result. She
had no place in her Pantheon for that which had
no arithmetical significance. She rated every man
by what he could bring, valued every man by the
amount of strength he could add to the republic.
If he could bring nothing—if, instead of contribut-
ing to the State, he required the State to contribute
to him—he was there and then regarded as a blot
on the political constitution, and a hindrance which
ought to be got rid of.
The effect of this appeared in the sequel. Rome
ended by reverencing an incarnation or embodi-
ment of that political power which had always in
the abstract been the object of her adoration; she
ultimately worshipped her own emperor. Let us
understand the significance of this act: it has been
often misunderstood, and it has frequently been
misinterpreted. In books written with a view to
show the downward tendency of Paganism, it has
been often said that the heathen world reached the
lowest depth of its abasement in the Roman deifi-
cation of the human. There is a famous antithetical
sentence which has expressed the thought thus:
The Message of Rome. 239
“The living God became man at the time when a
living man was worshipped as God.” And yet
nothing is more certain than the fact that the
antithesis between the religion of Christ and the
religion of Rome does not lie here, So far is the
deification of the human from being the last stage
of a downward development, there is no stage of
religious development which is not founded upon
this article. I have already exhibited the principle
that not only the root but the very presupposition
of all religion is the belief in incarnation, the belief
that the human is in the image of the divine.
Without this presupposition the only alternative is
agnosticism, and agnosticism without end. If the
divine be different in essence from the human, there
is no possible communion in any world between
the human and the divine. It speaks volumes for
the discernment of Judaism that, although by nature
prone to emphasise to the uttermost the distance
between God and man, it asserted from the very
foundation that man was made in the image of
God. In recognising in man the stamp of divinity, /
Rome was in strictest alliance with the whole de-
velopment of religion.
Dut the point of divergence lay in her ideal of
man himself. It is not too much to say that, in
conferring divine honours upon her emperor, Rome
erred not by deifying man too much but by deifying
him too little. Her doctrine of incarnation, instead

240 Messages of the Old Religions.
of going too far, did not go far enough. Her error
consisted in putting the crown of divinity on only
a part of humanity, and in leaving uncanonised the
other part. When Rome put the divine crown
upon the head of her emperor, she deified the in-
carnation of power. She selected from all the
attributes of humanity this one attribute, and in-
pressed it with the stamp of divinity. She said that
the One element in man worthy to be reverenced
and fit to be consecrated was his capacity to put
in motion the physical forces of the universe. She
deified him in his power to move masses, in his
ability to wield the sword, in his strength to con-
struct empires, in his force to exact and maintain
obedience. She recognised, in short, the incarnation
of humanity in so far as humanity was capable of
becoming a State-power. The defect of this ideal
was its narrowness. It lay, not as some think, in
the presumption of the creature, but in the creature
failing to aspire sufficiently high. It did not exalt
a large enough number of the elements of man. In
crowning his capacity for the exercise of physical
power, it left in the background other and more
glorious capacities. It forgot to note that there
were attributes in the human spirit which ex-
hibited a divine strength precisely in their in-
capacity to exercise physical power. It omitted to
observe that there is a force which consists not in
doing but in bearing, a strength which lies not in
The Message of Rome. 241
acting but in lying passive. It was oblivious of
the fact that in the display of this strength there
might be manifested a height of heroism and a
depth of human resources compared with which all
the past achievements of the empire were but the
exhibitions of child’s-play, Rome failed to realise
the union of humanity because she failed to perceive
the many-sidedness of man. - -
Now, it is here that there emerges the real con-
trast between the latest growth of the Roman
religion and the manifestation of that faith which
arose in the very midst of the empire—the gospel
of Jesus Christ. The difference between them lay
not in the idea that the one glorified the creature
and the other did not. Strictly speaking, they both
glorified the creature—both took hold of a human
life and lifted it into the presence of the divine.
The difference lay in the fact that the life which
Christianity lifted into the presence of the divine .
was a life of larger and fuller humanity than that
which Rome exalted. Rome crowned humanity
only in One of its aspects—the aspect of physical
power. Christianity crowned man all round, in
every sphere of his nature, in every promise and
potence of his life. It deified him as the prophet,
the priest, and the king, and in so doing it ex-
hausted all the possible fields of his action. When
it deified him as the king, it was, so far, in unison
with the Roman empire; it recognised the truth
Q

242 Messages of the Old Religions. .
that there is indeed something godlike in man's
power over the physical forces. When it wor-
shipped him as the prophet, it was in unison both
with the Greek and with the Jew; it recognised
the truth that in the revelations of human thought
and in the glimpses of poetic genius there are seen
the flashes of a light divine. But when it adored
him as the priest, it was in unison neither with
Toman nor Greek nor Jew; it transcended all, or
rather, it went down beneath all. It took up a part
of humanity which had always been regarded as its
contemptible part — the Susceptibility to pain. It
put a crown upon the head of that in man which
had hitherto been despised by man himself. It
proclaimed a doctrine which to the old world was
certainly a paradox. It said that the kingdom of
God recognised amongst the trophies of its glory a
multitude of Souls whom the kingdoms of this world
regarded as State hindrances. It declared that man
might be as great in his weakness as in his strength;
as heroic in his pain as in his power. The priest
had, even with the Jew, existed as a representative
of human nothingness; with Christianity he stood
forth as a representative of something which in
man was divine — the power to be touched with
the feeling of infirmities. - g
Hence it is that the incarnation taught by Chris-
tianity has been more thorough and fearless than
the incarnation taught by Rome. The religion of
The Message of Rome. . 243
Christ has prevailed over the religion of Rome,
simply from the fact that it has been less afraid to
exalt the human soul. Rome only canonised man
as an emperor; Christianity proclaimed the essential
sacredness of humanity in all its attributes. There
arose in the heart of the Roman empire the con:
ception of another empire called the kingdom of
heaven. It partook somewhat of the soil in which
it grew. It aimed at finding a meeting-place for all
things—a brotherhood amongst the nations and a
point of union with the divine. But it aimed at
more than that. It was not content to establish
a brotherhood of nations; it wanted a brotherhood
of Souls. It was not satisfied to find a point of
union with the divine; it desired the divine and
the human to be united along the whole line. It
called itself the kingdom of heaven, not to separate
itself from the kingdoms of earth, but to indicate
its wider comprehensiveness than any earthly king-
dom. It proposed to found a State which should
embrace amidst its members not only the active but
the passive units. It proclaimed for the first time
to the world what has since become a commonplace
—that they also serve who only stand and wait.
In thal aphorism there is at once involved an
enlargement of the whole idea of empire. The
conception of the kingdom of heaven was itself a
revelation to the old world. It told men that they
had made an inadequate census of the population,
244 Messages of the Old Religions,
that they had failed to enrol in the State the full
complement of its members. It told them that they
had not sufficiently estimated the actual strength of
any community, that in limiting their view to the
labourers and ignoring the heavy-laden, they had
left out of account the strongest proof of national
resources, the highest evidence of imperial power.
When it included within its borders the heavy-laden
as well as the labouring, it for the first time reached
the idea of a State coextensive with the Church, be-
cause coextensive with the needs of humanity.
It was fated, then, that the message of Rome
should be actually fulfilled within its own dominions
and within its own era. It was to be fulfilled,
however, not by Rome herself, but by another and
a humbler power. The office of Rome was, after all,
only that of John the Baptist; she prepared the
way. Her relation to Christianity was, indeed, no
merely negative one. She did not simply, as church
historians affirm, help to create a longing for the
light by increasing the power of darkness. Her
contribution to the world was a contribution of
light, and of light in the direction of Christianity.
She aimed at the construction of a universal king-
dom, and in so doing she was on the lines of the
coming faith. Her error was that her universal
kingdom did not embrace a universal humanity.
She gained all that she sought, but she sought too
little. The Roman empire was less comprehensive

The Message of Rome. 245
than the kingdom of heaven, and it was less com-
prehensive because it was less microscopic. It
measured forces too much by the extensiveness of
their range, and too little by the intensiveness of
their pressure. It incorporated the length and the
breadth, but not the depth of humanity. The king-
dom of heaven went down to the roots of human
nature—to its wants, to its sins. If I were allowed
to express the difference epigrammatically, I would
say that the religion of Rome and the religion of
Jesus were united in the first three petitions of that
Christian aspiration called the Lord's Prayer, Rome
said with Christianity, “Hallowed be Thy name’;
she was prepared to assert and to maintain the
dignity and the solemnity of that imperial structure
which she reverenced. She said with Christianity,
“Thy kingdom come”; her perpetual prayer was
for the establishment of her ideal kingdom. She
said with Christianity, “Thy will be done”; she
undertook no enterprise until she had first inquired
whether that enterprise should be favoured by
heaven. But there the concord ended and the
difference began. When Rome passed from the
divine to the human, she proceeded to halt in her
petitions. She had no prayer for the pure and
simple forgiveness of moral debts; she could only
ask what atonement would be accepted by the gods.
She had no prayer to be led out of the way of
temptation; she depreciated the danger on this side
246 Messages of the Old Religions.
of life. She had not even an unqualified prayer for
the distribution of daily bread; she had not learned
the full sense of the word “our.” Rome had a
distinct mission, but it was not a mission of finality;
she must be content to occupy the place and to
bear the reputation of a forerunner. Her crowning
glory must rest in the fact that she devised a scheme
of religious union the largest and the most com-
prehensive which the ancient world had ever seen,
that she made an honest and earnest attempt to
carry out that scheme into practical realisation,
and that she succeeded in the attempt in a measure
far beyond what could have been anticipated from a
mechanism which, after all, was constructed of such
inadequate materials. -
The Message of the Teuton. 247
CHAPTER XII.
TIIE MESSAGE OF THE TEUTON.
THE name “Teuton” is the term under which are
comprehended the Scandinavian and German Ta,CéS.
Detween both the speech and the mythology Of
these races there exists a very close affinity." The
result is that, notwithstanding the varieties of detail
which distinguish the worship of their different
nations, there is one common spirit pervading the
whole. The contrariety indeed seems to exist in
another direction. It does not strike us so much
when we survey the aspect of the ancient Teuton
nations, as when we compare the ancient aspect with
the modern. It seems strange at first sight that the
religion of the ancient Teutons should be so different
from the spirit of the modern Germans. Between
the earlicst and the latest forms of most faiths we
can detect a strong analogy. China, through all the
changes of the centuries, has retained her original
* See Jacob Grimm’s ‘Teutonic Mythology,’ of which there is an
excellent English translation. -
248 Messages of the Old Religions.
bias. India, through the circles of the suns, has
preserved her native spirit. Even Rome, amid the
complete transformation of her Pagan into her Chris-
tian life, has retained certain marked resemblances
which indicate to the eye of the observer that he
is looking on the same fabric. But when we turn
to modern Germany, we seem to find an utter con-
trast between the past and the present. The lapse
of time which intervenes between the life of the
ancient and the life of the modern Teuton is not
so great as the lapse of time which intervenes be-
tween the life of ancient and the life of modern
Bome. And yet, in the former case, the gulf is far .
wider and the hiatus far more marked than in the
latter. There is an analogy between the Saints of
the Roman calendar and the gods of the Roman
Pantheon; but where shall we find an analogy be-
tween the speculations of the modern German and
the faith of the primitive Teuton 2 The one is the
ancestor of the other, yet the chasm betwixt them
appears impassable. Modern Germany is confessedly
the sphere of the highest theological culture and of
the most abstruse religious thinking; primitive Teu-
tonism is on the surface the most crude of all beliefs
and the most childish of all worships. Is there any-
where to be found a bridge that connects them, any-
where a point of union between the dawn and the
meridian day ? -
I think there is. If we look closely and beneath
The Message of the Teuton. 249
the surface, we shall see that there are features in the
Teuton mythology which reveal something behind
them. We shall see, above all things, that this
mythology does not exhibit a uniform surface; that,
however crude it may be, it is at least decreas-
ingly crude. Every mythology exhibits variety; the
Teuton mythology reveals progress in its variety.
It is here that, I think, the real bridge is to be
found between the old faith and the new, between
the religion of the primitive Teuton and the relig-
ion of the modern German. If we take the Teuton
mythology as a whole, and confine ourselves to its
distinctive elements, we shall find that its message
to the world is summed up in a single word—
development. It is here that, in my opinion, the
point of difference lies between this mythology and
earlier mythologies. It has features in common
with the earliest creed of India, with the primitive
worship of Greece, and with the original faith of
Rome; but it differs from these in the fact that here
we have features of development. If it be so, we are
ushered into immediate contact with the modern
spirit of the Teuton race: The spirit of modern
Germany is essentially that of evolution. Even
from medieval days it has been the pioneer of human
progress, and in the nineteenth century it has led
the van. To the German races, in whatever land
they have been called to dwell, has been committed
the task of revealing the development of humanity.
250 Messages of the Old Religions.
The philosophy of Hegel has traced back that de-
velopment on the lines of spirit; the philosophy of
Darwin has traced it back on the lines of matter;
but both have equally had one aim—to exhibit the
connection between the future and the past. If the
Teuton mythology can be proved, even amidst its
crudeness and rudeness, to have evinced a glimmer-
ing sense of the unity of history, we shall plant our
feet upon the bridge that identifies the old spirit
with the new. - . .
Now, there is one element in this Teuton myth-
ology which deserves careful attention. It is the
fact that, notwithstanding the fantastic nature of
its materials, these materials, when taken together,
blend themselves into a system, I waive altogether
any reference to its cosmogony, although even there,
I think, it would be possible to trace a plan of
progressive development. But, dealing as I am with
the element of religion itself, I shall here as else-
where confine myself to the view taken of the
heavenly powers. It would not be at all remarkable
that the Teuton mythology should describe a progress
in the acts of creation.” But what strikes me as
very remarkable is that this mythology, when taken
as a whole, describes a progressive development in
the life of the gods themselves. Nowhere does the
ancient Teuton mind approach so near to the modern
Teuton mind as in the fact here indicated. The
peculiarity of German philosophy has not been its
The Message of the Teuton. 251
attempt to trace a development in history; that has
been done by many systems. Its peculiarity lies
in its endeavour to show that the development of
human history is the development of the divine
mind. It is this which constitutes at Once its bold-
ness and its originality. But if it should be found
that this tendency exists in the Teuton races from
the beginning, if it should be seen that it belongs to
the earliest as well as to the latest phase of German
thought, it will furnish a strong presumption that
the message of the Teuton has been One distinctive
to himself, and one which by nature he of all others
has been best qualified to give. *
Now, we find that the history of the gods em-
braced in this Teuton mythology consists of three
ages. The first age is a period of peace; it is a
time in which the heavens are silent, free from
war, undisturbed by commotion—a time in which
the industrial arts flourish, and the value of life is
measured by the amount of its beneficial resources.
This, in the Teuton mythology, is represented as the
golden age. It is rather curious that it should be
so. A man's conception of heaven is in general
only a transference into the air of the state in
which he lives on earth. But the state in which
the Teuton lived on earth was a state of war. The
beings whom he deifies are representatives of those
powers of nature which are distinguished for their
strength—a fact which proves conclusively that in
252 Messages of the Old Religions.
the world of his day the power most needed was
the capacity for conflict. At the head of the Pan-
theon stands Woden, a name symbolic of all phys-
ical majesty and all warlike strength. On a step
beneath him is Thor, the god of cloud, rain, and
thunder, enormously strong, and wielding a hammer
that can split the mountains. Next comes Tiu-
professedly the god of battle, the source of martial
honour, the inspirer of military prowess. At a
considerably lower remove stands Loki, the being
who presides over the element of fire, and who is
in future to develop into the great adversary of
goodness. But the strange thing is that he is not
yet become Satan; he has at the outset his place
amongst the angels. Should we not have expected
that a race like the early Teutons, living amidst
perpetual war, and feeling every day the neces-
sity for a strong protective hand, would have in-
vested the adversary from the beginning with his
aspect of Satanic terror, and represented the fields
of heaven as from the outset fields of incessant
battle 2 . . . . .
Yet the first stage of the Teuton mythology is
peace. The natural conclusion is that the first stage
of his history had been peace, that originally he had
lived in a state of primitive simplicity, the memory
of which still lingered. I do not think he would
have assigned this to the gods if he had not experi-
enced it and enjoyed it in himself, for our ideals of
The Message of the Teuton. 253
heaven were first our ideals of earth. There are:
traces, too, in this early Pantheon of the existence
of such a time. Side by side with the gods of mus-,
cular strength, there are seats for female divinities.
Wherever the divinity of woman is recognised, it
may be assumed that in the national life there has
once been an element of culture. When I learn
from the hymns of ancient India that she had a
place in her early Pantheon for the female side
by side with the male, I know assuredly that in
the early life of the race there was no place for
the zenanas; women could never have been ad-
mitted to the fellowship of the gods above, if they
had been secluded from the fellowship of men below.
Even so, when in the mythology of the ancient
Teuton I read of female divinities dwelling beside
the sons of thunder—when I hear of Frigga, the
goddess of the inhabited earth, free, beautiful, low-
able; when I am told of Freyja, the Venus of the
Teutons, representing the softer emotions of the
heart," I am led to the inevitable conclusion that
there was a time in which peace and not war was
both the practice and the ideal. I am constrained
to believe that the first age of the Teuton was an
age of more culture than the second, and that it
* It is true that in the elder Edda, Freyja is represented as
dividing the slain with Woden, but this is probably the result of
the corruption of first ideals. Edda is the name given to two col-
lections of national myths—the elder compiled in the twelfth, the
younger in the thirteenth century.
254. Messages of the Old Religions.
was through the lingering memory of that culture
that he made the beginning of heaven a scene of
calm. - -
By-and-by the curtain falls upon this scene, and
when it rises again there is a complete change. The
calm is broken and the storm has begun. If the
first age is a day of peace, the second is a night of
war. The heavens of the new period are no longer
in calm but in commotion. Loki has revealed him-
self in his true colours. He has ceased to be the
servant; he has become the adversary, the Satan.
He has set himself in deliberate antagonism to the
powers of heaven, and has become the origin of evil.
In so doing, he has become at the same time the
origin of good, for the one cannot be known without
the other. Hitherto the life of the gods had been
neither good nor evil; it had been simply natural.
They had dwelt in peace, merely because there was
no place for war, no opposition to the Original cur-
rent of the stream. But with the rebellion of Loki
the opposition began, and along with it came the
revelation of the tree of knowledge. The appearance
of war for the first time revealed peace. Before this
time peace had been an unconscious possession; war
made it a realised possession. Accordingly, it is
significant that, with the emergence of Loki upon
the scene, there emerges also another being on the
other side—Balder. If Loki is the principle of evil,
Balder is the first conscious and deliberate principle
The Message of the Teuton. 255
of good. The legends that surround his name con-
stitute some of the most beautiful portions of the
IEdda. He is the personification of all possible
virtues. He is transcendently beautiful, possessing a
form of radiant light. He is immaculately pure, and
into his heavenly mansion nothing unclean can enter.
In him are united the attributes at once of the male
and the female. Tike Thor, he is also the son of
Woden, and therefore in him there are found the
traces of martial firmness. His judgments are irre-
versible and beyond repeal; in this appear the quali-
ties of the male. But the female is represented in
the mode of execution. The outward régime is one
of conspicuous mildness; force has given place to
persuasion, and the influence of mind has succeeded
to the rod of authority. Balder, in short, seems to
me to represent the effort to find a union between
the gold of the ideal past and the iron of the actual
present. He unites in his own person the calm of
the one and the strength of the other. He stands
as a symbol of the truth that gentleness needs not
be weakness, that silence is not incompatible with
power, and that the intuitions of a feminine nature
may express a decision of character which is un-
matched by any exhibition of merely muscular force.
Let us pursue the narrative. The powers of good
and evil are now for the first time face to face with
one another. A conflict is inevitable, and we stand
breathlessly expecting the issue. Balder also stands
256 Messages of the Old Religions.
in expectation, and his expectation is of the most
gloomy character. His forebodings are of the worst.
He is tormented by horrible dreams, in which he sees
himself extinguished by the powers of evil. It is
a fine and subtle indication of the fact that the bur-
den of sin falls upon the sinless, and that the shadow
forecast by wickedness obscures most the path of the
good. To assuage the dreams of Balder, his mother,
Frigga, takes an oath of allegiance from all creation.
She exacts a promise from every object in the uni-
verse that it will do her son no hurt, from every
object but one. She forgets the mistletoe; she prob-
ably thought it too contemptible a thing to be dan-
gerous, too parasitic a thing to have any indepen-
dent efficacy. She ignored it by reason of its small-
ness, and because its life was so closely attached to
other lives. That one act of negligence becomes the
death of Balder. The gods, by way of experiment,
throw missiles at him composed of darts, stones, and
all things supposed to be of greatest natural danger,
and when he remains unhurt by these, they are com-
forted as to his safety. But the real danger lies in
the apparently soft and inoffensive thing. The dan-
ger of sin is not its openness but its subtleness, its
resemblance to that which is good and pure. That
this is the thought of the myth is to my mind be-
yond all question. The missile that destroys Balder
is not only the seemingly harmless mistletoe, but it
is the mistletoe thrown by the hand of one who is
*. The Message of the Teuton. 257
-->
blind. Loki, the principle of evil, does not discharge
the dart himself; he guides to the enterprise the
hand of a sightless being—the war-god, Other. Will
any one say that such a conception is accidental 2
Can it be thought for a moment that a convergence
of circumstances so unlikely and so inappropriate
could have been dictated by anything but the delib-
erate design of establishing a particular idea º And
is it not as clear as daylight that the idea designed
to be established is the subtlety of the power of sin 2
Is it not manifest, almost on the surface, that the
Touton is struggling to cmbody the truth that the
danger of temptation to a human Soul is not its
ugliness but its plausibleness 2 He wishes to give
expression to his belief that the Snare which besets
the heart of youth lies not in the attraction to any
form of sin revealed as sin, but in the fact that sin
prefers every form to its own, and habitually clothes
itself in the disguise of purity. In rude figures, in
coarse emblems, in imperfect metaphors, the mind
of the Teuton has given utterance to a truth as old
as creation and as modern as the latest day—that
the serpent is more subtle than any beast of the
field. -
Let us still pursue the narrative. Balder is slain
by the mistletoe ; goodness is blotted out from the
world by the subtlety of evil. When it is blotted
out its power begins to be felt. Balder is never so
greatly reverenced as when he is gone; the strength
R
258 Messages of the Old Religions.
of his presence is for the first time realised by the
blank of his absence. There is a universal weeping
amongst the gods, and a deputation is sent to the
goddess of the grave supplicating his return. It is
answered that the prayer will be granted, provided
that all things living and dead shall mourn his loss.
The condition is almost universally fulfilled. Every
object in creation, whether in heaven or on earth,
mourns for Balder, with one solitary exception—an
emissary of the Power of evil. It is a striking alle-
gory of the permeating influence of goodness. It rep-
resents the truth that every department of nature
is in some sense indebted to morality. For is it not
true that the loss of Balder is a loss to all things,
even to things which originally seemed to occupy a
foreign soil 2 Is it not true that poetry owes half
its beauty to the moral sentiment, that art is largely
indebted to the sacrificial instincts of the soul, that
eloquence receives its point and force from the
promptings of right and wrong, that warlike prowess
has its root as much in the conscience as in the arm,
that success in life is powerfully influenced by the
concentration of moral purpose, and that the polit-
ical ties which bind a nation are closely or feebly
riveted in proportion to the Social ties that bind the
family 2 All this was felt by the Teuton mind, and
all this is expressed in the fact that creation weeps
for Balder. Living amid the sinews of war, the hardy
Norseman had discernment enough to perceive that
The M.essage of the Teuton. 259.
the sinews of war could never form the body of a
State. He perceived that the root of all strength was
something behind it—that very element of morality
which is popularly thought to be the source of soft-
ness. He saw that to loose the mind from its ethical
moorings was to dissolve the whole fabric, social and
political, and to reduce to a collection of atoms that
Structure of imperial power which he believed to
dwell in the region of the heaveris.
Accordingly, we are not surprised to find that to
the mind of the Norseman the death of Balder be-
comes the beginning of all calamities. The demand
for his return has been almost universal, but not
altogether; it has been resisted by the Power of
evil. By that one act of resistance his return is
rendered as impossible as if the whole world had
opposed it. And the loss is total. We must re-
member that in the conception of the Norseman, the
death of Balder is not merely the loss of an in-
dividual; it is the extinction of an ideal. I have
often been struck with the words of St. Paul in
1st Corinthians ii. 8, where he says that if the
princes of the Roman empire had only known the
secret of their national strength “they would not
have crucified the Lord of Glory.” He is clearly
speaking of a moral and not a physical crucifixion.
He feels that what the princes of this world wanted
to do was not simply to put a man to death, but
to put an idea to death; that what they desired to
260 Messages of the Old Religions.
crucify was not the outward life of Jesus, but the
thought of Him, the spirit of Him, the ideal of
Him. And it is just because the death of Christ
was to them the death of an ideal that Paul lolds
them to have made a mistake. He tells them that,
by taking away from the young men of their em-
pire the portrait of moral heroism exhibited in the
Man of Nazareth, they have deprived the spirit
of youth of its greatest and noblest stimulus, have
deprived them of that very physical courage on
whose foundation they have mainly sought to build.
Such, in more extended form, I conceive to have
been the thought expressed in the Teuton's grief
for Balder. It is the cry not over a man but over
an ideal, the tears for the departure of one who is
not simply an individual but the embodiment and
incarnation of moral purity itself. Hence in his loss
the Teuton sees the loss of all things. He forecasts
his mythology into the future, and it is a forecast
of gloom. He sees a deepening of the conflict
between the Powers of hell and heaven, and, ever
increasingly, hell prevails. It is in vain that Loki
is chained to the subterranean sulphur spring; he
bursts his bonds and is free. There is seen ap-
proaching a time of unheard-of tribulation—a time
which the Eddas signalise as “the twilight of the
gods.” It is a time of cutting frost, of piercing
winds, of sunless air, of winter without spring. It
is a time of war and bloodshed, when nation shall
The Message of the Teuton. 261
rise against nation, and when, above all, a man's
foes shall be those of his own household. The
father shall be at variance with the child, the
brother shall lift his hand against the brother, the
ties of the household shall be rent in twain. At
last the crisis shall come; the Powers of good and
evil shall gather themselves together for a final con-
flict — the Armageddon of the Teuton mythology.
On the plain of Vigrid shall be fought the great
battle that is to decide the fate of the universe.
It is to be a battle of unexampled fury, of pro-
tracted tenacity, and of mutual destructiveness. The
two contending hosts are alike to be annihilated.
Loki, the Power of evil, is to fall, but Woden and
Thor are also to perish. At last the heat of battle
is to set fire to the universe. In the warmth of
conflict there is to be kindled a spark which shall
dissolve both friends and foes, and, like a mimic
scene, this whole vast creation shall disappear in
lurid flame. The earth shall be burned up, the
elements shall melt with fervent heat, the powers
of the heavens shall be shaken, and, over the spot
where raged the roar of battle, universal silence
shall reign. -
And here the curtain falls upon the second great
epoch of the Teuton mythology. Neither of the
two epochs has attained perfection. The first was
the age of innocence, when there was virtue in
heaven, simply from the fact that there was no war;
262 Messages of the Old Religions.
it was sinlessness in the absence of temptation. The
second was the age of conflict, when the existing
state of things was resisted by the Power of evil,
was no longer the age of innocence but the age of
law. . Yet very sublimely is it said that, even in
this time of comparative advancement, the days for
Balder had not come. Balder was the personifica-
tion of holiness, and holiness is just as incompatible
with conflict as with innocence. He cannot live in
a world where there is a struggle of the will; he
demands a surrendered will. The reign of law can-
not exist side by side with the reign of grace, for
law is virtue by restraint, grace is virtue by nature.
Accordingly, Balder had to go away until the times
of conflict were completed. The beauties of holiness
could only exist in spontaneity, and the presence
of Contending hosts was the absence of spontaneity.
If Balder should come back, it must be by the anni-
hilation of the hosts that contended, and by the
destruction of that age of restraint which is incom-
patible with spontaneous love.
But now this second age has been destroyed, and
on both sides the contending hosts are still. The
age of conflict has followed the age of innocence; it
has ceased to be... Out from the universal silence
there comes a new voice of creation. From the
under-world, from the world of the dead below the
sea, Balder returns. In the place where the old
The Message of the Teuton. .263
paradise stood there rises a new abode for the good,
—an abode of perfect beauty and of waveless peace.
Here is to begin afresh the life of humanity, on
a larger scale and with higher possibilities. Yet,
very significantly, it is suggested that there is to
be a thread of continuity between the old life and
the new. The inhabitants of the revived world are
to find the golden tablets which their race had
possessed at the beginning of time. It is a striking
metaphor of the belief that the state to which they
have finally attained had its germ in the state from
which they originally came. The abode of the gods
had been originally the home of Spontaneous virtue.
It was a spontaneity which came, indeed, only from
ignorance ; none the less was it the natural and
normal state of man. By-and-by the spontaneity
was broken by the conflict on the Mount of Tempta-
.tion, and innocence fled away, never to return. But
though the innocence could never return, the spon-
taneity could. There are two ways in which a life
may become spontaneous; it may be so by ignor-
ance of conflict, or it may be so by overcoming
conflict. The former method was past, and past for
ever, but the latter method was to come. There was
to open an age like the first, yet different, an age
in which virtue was again to become natural to man,
but in which the naturalness was to spring not from
ignorance but from habit. It was to be an age in
which the life of the universe was once more to
264 Messages of the Old Religions.
become a life of peace, no longer merely because
there were no materials for war, but because the
materials for war had been seen and discarded. The
third state of the Teuton, in short, was to be a new
paradise, exhibiting all the appearances of the Gar-
den of Eden, but exhibiting them on a totally op-
posite ground—on the ground of a virtue which had
met and conquered the tempter, and become by that
conquest the undisputed master of the field.
Will it be said that the view I have here taken
attributes to the Teuton an amount of subtlety
beyond the reach of a primitive age 2 I answer
that conscious mythology is necessarily subtle.
Mythology, as I take it, cannot belong to a primi-
tive age; it marks rather the twilight than the
dawn of early religious belief. It indicates the
stage in which the forms of nature are no longer
sufficient of themselves, and can only preserve their
reverence by receiving the clothing of the mind.
Mythology is in every instance an effort of the
poetic imagination—an effort to make one thing
wear the attributes of another, and, as such, it
demands and involves a long course of thought
and a considerable power of culture. Subtlety,
therefore, is inseparable from conscious mythology,
and the only question is whether the explanation
I have given is, in the circumstances, the most natu-
ral. It is only fair to state that mine is but one
attempt out of many. The explanations of the myth
The Message of the Teuton. 265
of Balder. have been beyond measure numerous."
It has been a favourite practice to see in it an
allegorical exposition of the outward processes of
nature. Max Müller, for example, regards it as
designed to describe the conflict between the
winter and the summer — the temporary sub-
mergence of nature beneath frost and Snow, and its
ultimate rising in the spring. I do not deny it. It
seems to me beyond all question that the Teuton
perceived the conflict of his life in the struggles of
the orb of day. But why did he perceive them
there ? Simply because he had first felt them in
himself. We are so familiar with the metaphor of
the sun struggling through clouds as to be in dan-
ger of forgetting that it is a metaphor. There is
nothing in the fact of the Sun making its way
gradually through clouds that could ever suggest
the idea of struggle, if that idea were not already in
the mind. The idea of struggle is a purely mental
conception; it is derived from consciousness alone.
It is received by our experience of a sense of resist-
ance, by our meeting with Some impediment to the
exercise of the will. When, therefore, I look up to
the heavens and figure there the battle between
light and darkness, I attribute to the heavens some-
thing which exists in myself alone. I paint upon
the walls of the universe a thought which belongs
* For a review of this subject see Weinhold, “Die sagen von Loki,”
in Haupt's ‘Zeitschrift für Deutsches Alterthum’ (Leip., 1849).
266 Messages of the Old Religions.
only to my own spirit, and which never could have
been known at all except through the movements of
that spirit. I write upon the doors of the outward
world an inscription which belongs to my inner
nature, and seem to receive from without an in-
pression which has really been imported from
within.
It is in vain, therefore, to say that the Teuton
derived his conception of Balder from beholding the
phenomena of the heavens; it is true, but it is
irrelevant. If he derived his conception from the
heavens, it was because he had first given it to the
heavens. The alternations of the outward light had
been to him simply a mirror in which he had seen
reflected the movements of his own Soul. When he
constructed the idea of Balder from looking on the
struggles of the summer Sun, he merely took back
from that sun the thought which he himself had
originally lent to it. The ultimate explanation of
the myth must lie in the region of the mind. Balder
himself is a personification, and so is the Sun in the
heavens; the one as much as the other requires to
be explained on mental grounds. If so, the explan-
ation ought to be very simple, and can be nothing
else than what has here been indicated. Balder in
the field of history, and the Sun in the field of the
heavens, are alike and equally the embodiment of a
great thought—the thought that the life of man pro-
ceeds from peace to conflict, and from conflict back
The Message of the Teuton. 267
to peace. But if it be so, it follows beyond all con-
troversy that the message of the Teuton is the mes-
Sage of development. To him distinctively amongst
the votaries of the religious world there has fallen
the task of exhibiting the progressive nature of the
divine life. The votaries of other faiths have been
concerned with other elements. The Brahman has
Seen the God above the world, and the Greek has
Seen the God in the world ; to the Teuton has been
assigned the part of describing the divine life above
the world and the divine life in the world, as sep-
arate stages of one and the same existence, as steps
of progressive development in the unfolding of the
universal plan.
And let it be remembered that to the playing of
this part the Teuton has been true. The message
of the primitive race has been the message of the
race in its phase of highest culture. At the begin-
ning of this century there appeared in Germany a
form of thought which has revolutionised all previ-
ous plilosophies, and exerted an influence even over
unsympathetic Schools; I allude, of course, to that
system called Hegelianism. It is supposed to be a
system defying the understanding of ordinary mor-
tals. Yef, when looked at dispassionately, and
divested of abstruse language, it will be found to
be simply a refined reproduction by the Teuton
mind in maturity of that which in primitive days
it conceived in germ. Hegel says that in the uni-
268 Messages of the Old Religions.
verse as a whole, and in every part of the universe,
there are three successive movements. The first is
one of unimpeded motion—of motion without oppo-
sition, and therefore without recognition. A man
running at full speed on a seemingly boundless
plain, and with no memory of having ever occupied
any other attitude, would never say even to himself
that he was free. The idea of freedom could only
be reached by an interruption to the seeming bound-
lessness, could only be realised in the meeting with
a barred gate. Accordingly the barred gate appears,
and marks the second stage of the universal life.
The unimpeded movement is interrupted, the un-
qualified affirmation is contradicted, and the day of
spontaneous growth is succeeded by the day of con-
flict. It is an hour of apparent decline, but of real
progress, the spirit of life has lost its first riches,
but in the act of losing, it has learned for the first
time what it is to be rich. Then comes the final
stage, in which the contradiction itself is reconciled,
and the spirit for the second time is actually, for
the first time consciously, free. The barred gate is
found to have, itself, an opening; it yields to the
pressure of the arm, and the struggling Soul is
again unimpeded on its way. Yet the last stage is
by no means a repetition of the first. It is freedom,
but it is freedom won. It is no longer the mere
rushing over a plain that is boundless; it is the
emancipation from a gate that is barred. It is not
The Message of the Teuton. 269
only the first state restored ; it is the first state
restored and revealed. Originally it was unre-
vealed; it was too near to the consciousness to be
itself an object of knowledge; it was unopposed,
and therefore it was unfelt. The barred gate
has restrained it, and therefore manifested it, and
in passing through the gate the life has for the
first time passed into the consciousness of its own
possession.
And what is this modern Hegelianism but a cul-
tured reprint of the primitive Teutonic view 2 Is
if not the same rhythm that is the object of search
in the myths of the ancient Eddas ? Here also we
see the three successive ages. We see the age of
spontaneous power, in which Woden and Thor reign
supreme, the period when there is peace in heaven
because there is as yet no admixture of the earth.
We see the age when the spontaneous power is
broken, and when, in the arena of deadly conflict,
good and evil stand face to face. At last we behold
the battle ended and the combatants swept away.
The days of spontaneity again return, but they are
no longer the spontaneity of ignorance. They are
the days in which the power of action has become
unconscious Uſ itself through long continuod con-
sciousness, in which virtue has become the native
atmosphere of the life by the persistent habit of
living within it. The peace of the last stage is not
the peace of paradise lost but of paradise regained,
270 . Messages of the Old Religions.
It is no longer simply a state into which the Soul is .
-born ; it is a state which the Soul has chosen, and
which by an act of will it has marked out for its own. .
And if the Teuton mythology has thus its signifi-
cance in the field of philosophic development, it is
not without a voice also in the field of Scientific
thought. It has been the office of the Teuton to
trace the development of the world not only from
within but from without; he has had his Darwin as:
well as his Hegel. And in the sphere of Darwinism,
as in the sphere of Hegelianism, the moral has been
the same—peace through conflict, unity through.
contradiction. Darwinism has sought to trace the
process by which the fittest have survived, and it.
has found that process to have been one of struggle.
Here again the Teuton mind has been true to itself,
true to its primitive myths and its primitive in-
stincts. What is the mythology of the Eddas but a
history of the survival of the fittest, and a delinea-
tion of how that survival has been effected through
struggle 2 There is, indeed, in the centre of this
mythology a thought which has a deep bearing upon
the whole question of Scientific survival. It empha-
sises beyond all other points the fact that the thing
which in the long-run is most fitted to survive is, on
that very account, the thing which in intermediate
periods is least adapted to live. Balder is the per-
sonification of all goodness and of all beauty; he is
the ideal of completed excellence, and therefore the
The Message of the Teuton. 271
goal of universal being. To him, accordingly, as a
matter of course belongs the final gift of immortality,
the right and the necessity to survive at the end of
the days. But for that very reason he is unable to
live in the middle of the days. His goodness and
his beauty fit him for an age of completed excel-
lence, but not for an age of struggling excellence,
not for a time when the average mind is intent only
upon the things of the outer life. There is an epoch
of history in which Balder is bound to die, bound by
his very greatness to succumb to other forces. That
which makes him great is at the outset that which
makes him solitary. He is at the beginning unlike
surrounding objects, and therefore he is at the be-
ginning alone. Being alone, he is one against a
thousand, and he falls beneath the weight of the
thousand. It is the primitive Adam in the centre
of the beasts of the field–greater than the serpent
in point of right, but inferior in point of fact. It is
the Grecian Socrates in the midst of the Athenians
—living before his time, and therefore compelled to
die ere his work is done. It is the universal Christ
in the midst of the men of Judah—proclaiming a
gospel for all nations, and therefore crucified by a
1 ace which has recognised a gospel only for one.
I3alder, by reason of his excellence, is always for a
time delivered unto death.
Now, why is this How does it happen that the
thing which by its nature is fitted to be the ultimate
272 Messages of the Old Religions.
survivor, and which as a matter of fact proves the
ultimate survivor, is yet compelled at the outset to
pass through a stage of death, to succumb to lesser
things? Science does not escape the problem any
more than the Teuton mythology. It is a truth
which must be recognised as much by the Dar-
winian as by the primitive man. We all see as a
matter of daily experience that the last are made
first and the first last; that the men and systems
which are despised and rejected by one age are pre-
cisely the men and systems which are lauded and
magnified by another. The question is, Why? Does
it not involve a principle above and beyond mere
evolution, a principle which evolution in itself is not
adequate to explain 2 Evolution can account for the
survival of the fittest, but it does not tell me why
that which is killed to-day should have its resurrec-
tion to-morrow. Balder is always overcome at the
beginning, because he is physically less strong than
his opponents; but he is not a bit physically stronger
at the end than he was at the beginning, nor are
his opponents one whit more physically weak. Why,
then, is the result so different It is because the
world has changed its ideal of what constitutes
beauty. It is because the physically strong is no
longer reckoned the highest type of power, and the
restraint of passion no longer deemed the natural
mark of weakness. Here, it seems to me, there
enters an element beyond the merely mechanical—
The Message of the Teuton. 273
an element with which evolution may indeed co-
operate, but which of itself it cannot comprehend.
There is not even any necessity that an evolution
should be progressive at all. Huxley says it is
equally consistent either with going on, going back,
or standing still.” If it has consistently gone on
even amidst its moments of regress, if it has taken
up Balder after he has been slain, and has laid in
the dust his once omnipotent foes, it can only be
because there is in the universe a principle of Se-
lection beyond the natural, and a law of growth
superior to the force of mechanism. I think, thoro
fore, that the primitive Teuton has judged well in
placing the Secret of development not in the earth
but in the heavens. It is no accident in his system
that the new world rises from the positive annihila-
tion of the old. It is from the blank space of an
extinguished firmament and an utterly obliterated
earth that there is made to come forth a land
wherein dwelleth righteousness. Nowhere has the
myth more thoroughly transcended its mythicism
than in such a thought as that. It has parted with
the material image in Search of Something that is
not material. It has abandoned the metaphors of
human analogy in pursuit of an agency whose mode
of working is beyond all description of language, and
whose process of action is incalculable by human
* See article “Evolution,” “Encyclopædia Britannica,” ninth
edition.
S
274 Messages of the Old Religions.
intelligence. It has here again been true to itself,
consistent with that instinct which always and
everywhere has followed the Teuton race—an in-
stinct which even in physical researches has never
paused at the gates of the physical, and which at
the back of the scientific universe has found a force
that is inscrutable and unknowable.
The Message of Egypt. 275
CHAPTER XIII.
THE MESSA GE OF E G Y PT.
IT is a long cry from the Teuton to the Egyptian.
It is the paggage from a living to a dead Sca. The
Teuton is very much alive; the Egyptian has passed
away. The one is an active force, present and
potent; the other is a historical memory, vener-
able and outgrown. They belong, besides, to two
different lines of thought. The Teuton is the last
of the Aryans; the Egyptian is the first of the
Semitics. The distinction is by no means a merely
geographical one; it indicates a change of stand-
point. The Semitic begins where the Aryan ends.
The Aryan starts from nature, from life, from
history, and thence rises to the conception of a
Power beyond them all; the Semitic starts with
the recognition of a transcendent Power, and thence
descends to the study of nature, life, and history.
The former begins with the seen and temporal, and
ends with the unseen and eternal; the latter begins
with the unseen and eternal, and ends with the
276 Messages of the Old Religions.
seen and temporal. The result is in each case the
same, but the method is different; the one ap-
proaches God through the world, the other finds
the world through God.
In the Aryan religions we saw the human mind
climbing from the temporal into the eternal. India
grappled with the problem of life; Persia strove
with the fact of sin; Greece wrestled with the
aspect of things as they are; Rome sought to estab-
lish a unity on earth. The Teuton aspired higher
still, and aimed to find the unity both of earth and
heaven. And we saw how, in the closing scene of
all, the Teuton expressed his consciousness that
there was something more than all these material
things put together, how, even after both the
heavens and the earth had passed away, he beheld
an unknown and inscrutable Force fashioning a
grander and a more enduring universe. Now, the
Teuton’s ending was the Egyptian's beginning.
What the Norseman proclaimed as a last result
was from the outset the faith of the dweller on
the Nile. To him the root of all religion was the
unknowableness of God. He started from the
conception that there is a Power man Cannot
comprehend — a Power whose ultimate essence is
beyond human scrutiny. His message to the world
was primarily the announcement of mystery, the
proclamation that there were more things in heaven
and earth than men had yet dreamed of. This is
The Message of Egypt. 277
distinctively his message. He has other aspects for
other lines of thought — for the historian, for the
antiquarian, for the student of the Old Testament.
But for the religious life his significance lies in
this, that he has striven to worship a God who,
in the completeness of His being, has no distinct,
definite, or exhaustive image, who cannot in Him-
self be represented to the sense, who in every object
and in every sphere defies computation and eludes
scrutiny."
And this is all the more noteworthy from the
fact that, on a superficial view, it appears to be the
reverse of the truth. So far back as the beginning
of the second Christian century, the Egyptian Creed
was charged with inconsistency by Clement of
Alexandria.” He makes merry over searching for
the veiled god, and finding him at last in such
common forms as the cat or the crocodile. But
Clement is wrong. The cat and the crocodile, and
all other forms whatsoever, are, in the eyes of the
Egyptian, themselves only veils—coverings of some-
thing which is greater than they. There are two
ways in which a man may express his sense that
God is incapable of being imaged; he may symbolise
Him nowhere, or lie IIIay sy IIIbolise IIim cycrywhoro.
* The unity of this primal force in the Egyptian worship is
strongly asserted by M. Emmanuel de Rougé, “Conférence sur
la religion des anciens Egyptiens,” in the ‘Annales de la Philo-
sophie Chrétienne,’ tome xx, p. 327.
* “Paedagog., iii. c. 2.
278 Messages of the Old Religions.
The latter is as effectual as the former, and it is the
method of the Egyptian. He wanted to show that
no single image could represent God, and So he
made all things image Him. He saw Him in the
heavens and in the earth, in the land and in the
water, in the male and in the female, in the animal
and in the man. He associated with the rites
of religion nearly every living thing and wellnigh
every human pursuit." He made no difference
between the high and the low. He consecrated the
palace of the Pharaohs, but he consecrated equally
their tombs. He adored the Sun in its course, but
he adored also the worm in its earthward movement.
What annihilated to his mind the distance between
great and Small was the idea of religion, the Sense
that always and everywhere the inscrutable Power
was abiding. It was this which made one thing not
grander than another thing. A common majesty
belonged to all—the majesty encircling the fact
that every form had in it a life beyond its own,
and that each was the receptacle of an unfathomed
and unfathomable mystery.
And, in point of fact, I think it will appear
that, while the Egyptian reverences all creation,
he attaches the greatest reverence to those aspects
* This universality of religious association in Egypt is pointed
out by Renouf, ‘Hibbert Lectures (1879) on the Origin and
Growth of Religion, as illustrated by the Religion of Ancient
lºgypt," p. 26.
The Message of Egypt. 279
of creation which carry with them the idea of con-
cealment. He worships the sun under the name of
Osiris. Very significantly, however, it is the setting
and not the rising that rivets his eye. It is from
the spectacle of the death of Osiris that he draws
his highest inspiration. In the desolation of the
earth under the pall of night, he sees the grief of
Isis for her murdered husband, and pays his tribute
of adoration to a hidden glory. In the animal
world, again, what is that which has evoked his
worship ! It is the preseaee—of a mystery. He
beholds in it something which he cannot understand.
Instinct is a hidden life to the man of reason. Its
modes of action are unintelligible to calculation.
Man must say of the animal as he says of the
divine, “I am an agnostic ; I cannot comprehend
it.” It is this which has made the Egyptian
reverence the beast of the field—a vision of some-
thing which is inscrutable. I know as little of that
which is beneath me as of that which is above me;
both are to me alike mysterious. Is it surprising
that I should revere the one as much as the other,
and for precisely the same reason—because both
belong to an intelligence that transcends my own 2
Nor Will this Egyptian lendency be less cuspicu-
ously evident, if we turn to that product of the
national art whose very name has become synony-
mous with mystery—the Sphinx. It is a hieroglyphic
figure whose lower part is the form of a lion, whose
280 Messages of the Old Religions.
higher is the shape of some other creature—some-
times of an animal, frequently of a man, occasion-
ally, though rarely, of a woman." What is the mean-
ing of this riddle 2 Various conjectures have been
formed, but it seems to me that it lies on the sur-
face. Is it not intended to be conveyed that there is
an unseen bond uniting the different lives of crea-
tion ? We are familiar in modern times with what
is called the transmutation of species. The ancient
Egyptian was not, nor did he think of it. Yet to
his reflective mind—a mind that had already enjoyed
a long term of civilisation—it appeared that there
was an invisible something which joined together
the different parts of creation — a subtle and im-
palpable element which constituted the unity of
life in reptile, bird, beast, and man. Nay, I would
add, “in the gods also.” I believe the idea of the
Sphinx to be at the root of Egyptian theology as well
as of Egyptian Science. The gods of Egypt are in-
numerable by name; but are they innumerable in
fact On the contrary, every new research has tended
more and more to confirm the impression that in the
view of the worshipper the many are but various
aspects of the one. Osiris, Isis, Horus, Rä, Set,
nubis, are but the special forms of one Presence
which constitutes the boundary of each, and veils
the secret of its being. The universe is itself a
divine figure, enclosing many shapes, and embodying

* See Dean Stanley, ‘Sinai and Palestine,’ p. lvii.
The Message of Egypt. 281
many degrees of intelligence. Each is regarded with
reverence, but only on the ground that each is other
than itself. It is worshipped not for what it reveals,
but for what it keeps hid. It is worshipped because
it conceals from the eye and ear of the beholder a
life more potent than its own—a life without which
its own could not live, and which yet it is powerless
to comprehend.
If I were asked to define the religion of Egypt in
a single sentence, I should say, it is the faith which
apologises for what is called an idolatrous worship.
Tf denies that idolatry is what it is said to be. It is
said to be image-worship. To the Egyptian it is the
worship of everything but the image. It is the rever-
ence of the thing which is hidden, covered, unrepre-
sented. The image is not a revealer but a veil. It
provokes curiosity; it tells the bystander that there
is something underneath. And in this the Egyptian
is true not only to what is technically called idolatry,
but to all forms of adoration, all forms of admiration,
all forms of love. It may be said as a matter of
experience, and without fear of contradiction, that
our devotion to any object is founded on more than
actually appears. What do we mean by saying that
such an object is our ideal Z We mean that it is
more than meets the eye, more than meets the ear,
more than meets the sense, more than is ever mani-
fested anywhere—that we have attached to it a life
other than its own.
282 - Messages of the Old Religions.
I may illustrate this from three different sides of
man's nature—the retrospective, the prospective, and
the introspective. In order to give all possible force
to the illustration, I shall take an example of each
of these influences from a physical rather than from
a moral ideal. And first: Many a landscape is in-
debted for half its charm to memory; perhaps every
landscape is indebted to memory for Some of its
charm. Mr Herbert Spencer says that all cognition
is recognition. If it be so, it follows that every per-
ception of beauty is, like the vision of the Sphinx, a
sight of two lives in one. It is a perception in which
there is a transmutation of to-day into yesterday, in
which the present only lives by going back into the
past, and the day which has dawned subsists by the
day that is dead. You stand in the Bay of Naples
and pronounce it beautiful. But is the Bay of Naples
at this moment the only object in your mind's eye 2
Have you not seen in it a real or fancied resemblance
to Loch Lomond 2 If you have, and if you are a
native of Britain, you are not an idolater of the Bay
of Naples. It is not really or essentially a foreign
scene that you are beholding; the figure of the
foreign has passed into the figure of home. There
are more things than men dream of which are bear.
ing a vicarious merit, which owe their attractiveness
to something. Outside of themselves. The actual
image is little more than a veil which conceals from
the view the real object of admiration, and claims
The Message of Egypt. 283
for the present hour a tribute which is meant for
the past.
I shall take the second illustration not from mem-
ory but from hope. How many odes have been writ-
ten to the spring ' It is associated with all bright
things. It is the symbol of joy, the emblem of good
fortune, the synonym for the close of dark days.
And yet, let us reflect how much of this belongs not
to the spring at all. How much of it is the voice of
full-blown summer. We have given the ripeness to
the germ ; we have assigned to the acorn what only
pertains to the Oak. Measured by its actual self,
the spring effects little. It retains much of the sur-
vival of old culture—of the past winter's cold. It
gives only a promise and a very Small earnest. If
the world were to be arrested in its stage of spring
and forced to stay there, the lovers of the season
would soon desert her. What they love about her
is an imputed righteousness. She wears an antici-
pated glory—the glory of the summer. She has been
transmuted in imagination into that which is still in
advance of her ; she is only what she is by being
another. It is the story of the Sphinx repeated. The
present and the future lie on One stem, and neither
can live apart from the other; neither can say to
the other, “I have no need of thee.” It is not the
image which is worshipped, but its possibility of, one
day, imaging greater things.
The third of the influences which exemplify the
284 Messages of the Old Religions.
Egyptian tendency is what I have called introspec-
tive. We may take an instance from one of the most
common acts of perception—looking on an expanse
of sea. Let us say that it is a very limited expanse.
Let it be the place where the waters are only begin-
ning to widen, and where the land is yet visible on
every side. Even in these narrow circumstances the
impression produced upon the sense will be one of
boundlessness. We shall have a feeling of unim-
peded freedom, a sense of unqualified enlargement,
an experience of complete emancipation from earthly
restraints and limits. Now, how are we to explain
this phenomenon 2 We are venerating an arm of
the sea for the possession of a quality which does
not even belong to all the united Oceans of the world.
There is not a boundless Sea on the globe, nor does
the spectator for a moment believe that there is.
What, then, does he behold 2 Not the image, but
something beneath the image—the aspirations of his
own soul. He looks into the transparent waters to
contemplate the trembling of the waves, and he sees
there another figure which he cannot distinguish
from the waters, which seems to have transformed
the waters into its own likeness; it is the spirit of
man. The riddle of the Sphinx has its parallel in
the things of the common day; it is still equally
present and still equally unsolved.
These illustrations may help us, I think, to under-
stand the nature of Egyptian worship. The object
The Message of Egypt. 285
of Egyptian reverence seems to me to be in every
case that mysterious boundary-line which at once
divides and unites the creatures of the world. It is
the place where one being separates from another
being, to be blended with him again in some un-
accountable way. I do not know whether it has
been put in this form before, but it will be found,
I think, to be in harmony with all modern research
and consistent with the facts already known. The
message of Egypt is, in short, the message of the
Sphinx — the relation between the many and the
one. Whatever tends to exhibit this relation, either
on the side of Separation or on the side of union, is
hailed by the ancient Egyptian, and consecrated as
an object of adoration. It is adored for its mys-
teriousness, for its impalpableness, for its subtle
power of eluding explanation and baffling scrutiny.
And the influence of this tendency will be found to
have been most potent, to have made Egypt dis-
tinctively what she is. I might show this in many
directions, but I confine myself to One, that which
is opened up by her oldest and most important
document—the Book of the Dead." It is significant
that this should be her most important document,
siguiſicant that cycn in the days of her infancy her
eyes should have first rested with fascination on
* Detailed information regarding this work will be found in
Bunsen’s “Egypt's Place in Universal History.’ See also Renouf,
p. 172, ‘Hibbert Lecture.’
286 Messages of the Old Religions.
that awful presence of death from which the eyes
of others are habitually repelled. A fact so strange
and so unique must have some connection with the
religious system which contains it, and therefore it
demands a special consideration.
From the very dawn of her existence Egypt has
consecrated the idea of death. Her position in so
doing has been, so far as I know, abnormal. In
Christianity alone do we find anything which ap-
proaches to similarity. China never consecrated
death; it had no place and no provision within
her system. India did not consecrate death; she
looked upon both life and death as illusions, and
so she spurned them both. Persia did not conse-
crate death; she believed in the immortality of the
spirit, and for that very reason she resisted the
trappings of the grave. The touch of a dead body
was, to her, defiling, and therefore she hastened to
consume the unconscious clay. And, although stand-
ing at opposite angles from One another, and acting
from opposite motives, neither Judea nor Greece
consecrated death. Judea saw in it the penalty for
a violated law; Greece bewailed in it the interrup-
tion of a self-satisfied life; both equally averted their
eyes from it. Amid great dissonance of opinion on
other points, amid evidences of mental diversity and
indications of contrary ideals, there remains on this
one head a voice of general unanimity; all alike
recoil from the symbols of the grave,
The Message of Egypt. 287
All but one. In the face of the old world, Egypt
stands out as a remarkable exception. Here we
have not only an absence of the usual recoil from
death, but we have substituted for it a positive at-
traction towards the elsewhere loathed object. If
she were a pessimistic nation, we might to some
extent understand it ; but, as Renouf points out, she
was not. She had in her much of the Greek's love
of pleasure, and much of his temptation to seize the
present hour. Yet, unlike the Greek, the Egyptian
haunted the sepulchre. Most nations have been
kept alive by preserving their treasures from the
tomb; it would hardly be too much to say that
Egypt has been kept alive by putting her treasures
Žn the tomb. That by which her greatness to-day
is known is her Pyramids and her books, and both
are memorials of death. Her Pyramids are her
testimony to the fact that death has not robbed
her kings of their majesty. Her books are more.
They are the aspirations of the living after com-
munion with the dead. The Egyptian is not afraid
to plant these aspirations in the coffin. When we
of modern times write a panegyric on the departed,
we do so in order to give it publicity. We design
that it shall find its way to the eyes Uſ IIIell. Dut
when an Egyptian wrote a panegyric on One de-
parted, he did so in order that he might put it in
the grave; he laid it where he had laid his heart
—in the coffin with Caesar. The reason was that to
288 Messages of the Old Religions.
his mind the symbols of death did not suggest as-
sociations contrary to life and immortality. They
did not even suggest what they did to Jews and
early Christians—the sleep of the soul. To the
Egyptian death was not a sleep; it would not be
too much to say that it was a waking. In the view
of this early faith the blessed dead, so far from
having a diminished being, have entered into a
larger power. They have entered into a life of
three progressive stages. In the first they have to
stand before the judgment-seat. In the second they
reach the power of transformation—become able at
will to take the shape of everything in the universe."
In the third they take the likeness of the Supreme
God Himself, and become united to the source of all
being. Not in spite of death, but by reason of
death, does the Egyptian cherish this hope. Others
have cherished that hope as well as he, but they
have entertained it in defiance of the king of terrors.
Egypt has entertained it through a mystic rever-
ence for that king and his kingdom, and has found
her portal to immortality in the shadows of the
grave. -
The question is, Why? What is that which to the
Egyptian has robbed death of its terror As I have
said, it is not a pessimistic view of life; the Egyptian
loves the world and the things of the world. Why,
then, is he so attracted towards that which most
* Renouf, ibid., p. 181. e
The Message of Egypt. 289
worldly people are desirous to forget 2 It is by reason
not of his life but of his doctrine. He reveres beyond
all things the boundary-line, and death is the great
boundary-line. The boundary-line is to him that
which leads from one stage of being into another
stage of being—that which explains the riddle of the
Sphinx. So completely has the Egyptian mind been
moulded by the Sphinx problem, that, as we have
seen, it regards the glory of the higher heaven as
consisting in the Soul’s power to transform itself.
Death is looked upon as a possible source of trans-
formation. In the mind of a primitive race there
is hardly a step from possibility to certainty. The
infant intelligence proverbially leaps to conclusions,
and hope passes at a bound into conviction. So
was it with the Egyptian. Death was a boundary-
line; being a boundary-line, it was a mystery; being
a mystery, it was full of all possibilities; being full
of possibilities, it was to the world's youth radiant
with certainties. Therefore he invested it with a
romantic interest, that interest with which the child
regards not only the entrance upon a journey but
any peculiar vehicle through which the journey is to
be accomplished. The locomotive and the steamboat
may be now to the child, and they are accompanied
by elements which are calculated to excite its fear.
Yet both of these facts enhance its attractiveness to
the juvenile mind, and the fear itself is transmuted
into a joy—that joy of indefinite possibility which,
T
290 M essages of the Old Religions.
alike to child and man, is ever wrapt up in a sense
of unfathomable mystery. -
And now let us ask, Is this a permanent message 2
Has it contributed anything to the spirit of absolute
religion ? The ancient Egyptian is in a different
position from the ancient Indian, the ancient China-
man, the ancient Jew, the ancient Greek, or even
the ancient Teuton. These are the ancestors of races
yet alive. But the Egyptian is dead. He is as
obsolete as his Pyramids; the place that knew
him knows him no more. Nor can it be said
that his influence has been great in moulding the
faith of other nations. Renouf will not admit that
he has influenced either the Greek or the Jew," and,
if he has not affected these, he has touched no one.
But, conceding all this, there is a question which
remains. Does any part of the faith of Egypt belong
to the Church universal : She may be dead as a
nation, she may be inoperative as a historic power,
and yet her experience may be the experience of
all the world. And so it is. This message, dis-
tinctive of the creed of Egypt, is universal to the
thought of mankind. There are two things which
are declared in the religious message of Egypt—
that the beginning of all faith is mystery, and
that the beginning of all mystery is the boundary-
line. In neither of these points has Egypt become
superannuated.
- * Renouf, ibid., p. 243,
The Message of Elypt. 291
And first. The Egyptian is right in holding that
faith begins with mystery. It would perhaps be
more correct to say that the Sense of mystery is the
essence of faith. One would be apt at first sight to
suppose that faith would have its origin in revelation
—in the seeing of all things clear. In truth it is
not so. Faith demands beyond everything a hazy
atmosphere. It cannot sing in the full light; it
must at most have no more than the dawn. The
root of all worship is wonder, and wonder comes
from a sense of baffled reason. It originates in the
conviction that we have come to a door for which
we cannot find the key, and whose other side is
incomprehensible. It is the concealed spots of
nature that we worship; it is the veil and not the
revelation that we reverence. Nor let it be said
that such a view makes religion a thing of child-
hood. As a matter of fact, the sense of mystery is
not deepest in the child; it grows with our growth
and expands with our reason. Mr Herbert Spencer
does not scruple to say that its highest development
is the age of science. He tells us that the scheme
of evolution propounded by himself, which has
certainly been accepted as the scheme of modern
science, is fitted to awaken far deeper wonder than
the popular theories of the olden time. In this
all will agree with him, whatever they may think
of his theory itself; and the concession on his part
is remarkable. It amounts to a statement that
292 Messages of the Old Religions.
wonder increases in proportion to the degree of
intelligence, and that the measure of human know-
ledge is the measure of man's sense of mystery.
The first position, therefore, of Egypt is uncon-
troverted even in the most modern times. Agnos-
ticism is a more religious belief than Atheism, and
why Z Because it admits that there is something
about the universe which compels it to say, “I do
not know.” In this it is at one with all religion ; it
finds at the core of things a background of mystery.
The psalmist of Israel asks that his eyes may be open
to behold “wonderful things out of the law.” In old
days men only conceived wonder in the violation of
law, or, in other words, in the spirit of lawlessness.
But the psalmist's prayer has been answered, and
the commonplace has been glorified. If the belief
in miracle has faded, it is not because the sense of
wonder has passed away; it is rather because wonder
has been found where miracle is not, because order
has been discovered to yield that mystery which was
once thought to belong to disorder alone. Thus, at
the beginning and at the end of the process, we have
perfect unity — the changeless amid the mutable.
Between ancient Egypt and modern England there is
externally and intellectually a wide gulf; there is all
the difference of the meridian and the dawn. Yet
as there is something in the dawn which exists in
the meridian, so there is something in ancient Egypt
which exists in modern England. The spirit of
The Message of Egypt. 293
mystery has persisted through all changes. Amid
an opposite culture, amid an enlarged universe, amid
a new heaven and a new earth, there has remained
in the sphere of law that which operated in the
sphere of miracle, and the last state, like the first,
has been a sense of Wonder.
We pass to the second point in the message of
Egypt. It is the belief that all mystery lies in the
vision of a boundary-line—in that which divides on
life from another life. And here again it will be
found that the experience of modern times is the
same. Take fibe mystery of modern Agnosticism.
What is that which makes the Scientist of our day
say “I do not know’’ It is the fact that he has
discovered a boundary - line which he cannot pass.
In every department the mystery is felt to be this
boundary-line. Each thing is manifestly connected
with every other thing; yet between any two objects
the manner of connection is veiled. Take the sim-
plest act of perception. What is the reason that a
little thing like my eye can hold such a vast field as
the visible universe ? Why is it that a very small
picture like the retina can take in such a wide ex-
panse as the starry firmament with its countless
worlds and its interstellar spaces ! That is a ques-
tion which no man can answer. It is an ultimate
fact of knowledge, undisputed and indisputable, but
perfectly inexplicable. It is the boundary-line be-
tween two creations—the human and the physical.

29.4 Messages of the Old Religions,
There they stand, parallel to one another and con-
nected with one another, but connected by the riddle
of the Sphinx—joined by a bond which no man has
Seen, and intertwined by a marriage that no man has
witnessed. The first act of infancy, the most exter-
nal act of all life, is as unintelligible to sense as any
part of the universe, as profound a mystery as the
problem of creation itself.
If we take any other sphere of thought, we shall
find the same experience—that mystery lies in the
boundary-line. There is a missing link between
matter and force, between plant and animal, between
animal and man, between one man and another man.
It is these missing links which constitute the four
great mysteries of earth — the mystery of life, the
mystery of consciousness, the mystery of intelligence
and the mystery of personality. Before these the
scientist bows. They are the margin left for faith,
or for what to him stands for faith—Agnosticism.
He believes in the riddle of the Sphinx—in the fact
that the lives of all creation are somehow united.
But that “somehow” is the consecrated spot. It is
consecrated by its mystery, by its inscrutability, by
its unknowableness. It is a sea which ship has
never sailed, a depth which line has never sounded.
The ancient Egyptian and the modern scientist stand
alike upon the shore and hear the play of incompre-
hensible waters. The past and the present are re-
The Message of Egypt. 295
conciled in the vision of the fathomless, and the
evening and the morning are one day.
And, if Egypt added yet another boundary-line
in the great fact of death, she surely erred not by
defect of logic. If she regarded it hypothetically as
a transition field, and reverenced it as a hope, she
had at least analogy on her side ; she was consistent
with herself, and consistent with the facts already
known. In all departments of life she had found
the presence of the Sphinx, found that the close of
one form of being was but the entrance into another.
She had discovered in each case that the process of
transition was perfectly inexplicable. If matter be-
came spirit, it did so by Surrendering its own life;
if the animal became the man, it did so by losing
itself in an existence foreign and destructive to its
own. Is it surprising that she should have gone
one step further, and claimed a corresponding egress
for the valley of the shadow of death 2 Is it sur-
prising that in this terminus of the individual life
she should have seen only a new beginning and a
possible entrance into a higher sphere ? At all
events, she has done SO, and in doing So she has been
guilty of no anachronism. Upon the shore of death
the mass of humanity still stands with hope. Even
the Positivism of a J. S. Mill did not seek to extin-
guish hope's trembling star. Agnosticism itself is a
form of hope; if it objects to affirm, it refuses to
296 Messages of the Old Religions.
deny. Its attitude is that of the uncovered head
acknowledging the presence of a mystery. The
mystery which it acknowledges is the same as that
before which Egypt bowed six thousand years ago—
the recognition of an invisible boundary-line between
a world which is seen and temporal, and a state
which no man can define.
The Message of Judea. 297
CHAPTER XIV.
THE ME S S A G B OF JUIDEA.
IT seems at first sight as if this were a message
which needed no chapter. We of the Christian
persuasion have read from childhood the books in
which it professes to be delivered. We are familiar
with their every phrase; we are conversant with
their every sentiment. They have become to us
as household words. They are a species of litera-
ture known alike to the cot and the palace, prized
alike by the peasant and the Sage. One would cer-
tainly imagine that their purport would by this
time be read, marked, learned, and inwardly digested.
And yet, if we put to ourselves the question, What
is the message of Judea 2 we shall probably be struck
with the difficulty of giving a defensible answer.
Of course it is very easy to tcll a hundred things
that are taught in the Old Testament; but the ques-
tion is, Are they taught there alone 2 If not, then
they cannot be regarded as the distinctive message
of Judea ; they must be looked upon as parts of the
298 Messages of the Old Religions.
religious life itself. I.et us consider one or two of
the answers which are popularly given to this ques-
tion; we shall find that they by no means exhaust
the problem.
And first. A very common answer is that the
mission of Judea was to tell the unity of God.
That ultimately it did tell the unity of God is
beyond dispute; whether originally it did so is very
doubtful. But waiving this, is the unity of God at
any time a doctrine peculiar to Judaism 2 I have
pointed out in the introduction to this book that it.
is at all times more natural to the human mind than
Polytheism. We have seen, moreover, that some of
the earliest forms of thought have, either at their
base or at their apex, held the existence of one
central principle. India culminates in this belief,
alike in the system called Brahmanism, and in that
Nirvana of the future in which the Buddhist sees
the goal of all things. Egypt, according to the best
interpreters, recognises this thought from the outset,
and more distinctly still. The many here are but
various forms of the one, and the worship of the
many is but the reverence of the manifold wisdom
of God. I do not for a moment imagine that Judea
got her notion of divine unity from dwelling in
Egypt, any more than Egypt received hers by asso-
ciating with Judea. But I think it very likely that
they may have been brought together, and for a time
kept together, by the experience common to them
The Message of Judea. 299
both. Neither the one nor the other can claim the
unity of God as a distinctive possession ; it belongs
to both, and therefore it is the property of neither.
Judaism never professes to have a special revelation
of God; it begins by assuming God. Instead of Say-
ing that He is, it says that He created the heavens
and the earth. Why so 2 Clearly because the dis-
covery of God's being was not appropriated as a
part of the national consciousness. The Jew felt
that he had come into it as into an inheritance de-
rived from some other source. It had been his from
the dawn of his being, and therefore it was not his
by conquest. It was a possession which he shared
with the race of humanity, a foundation on which
he might indeed build a special temple, but which
was at the same time the foundation for independent
houses, and one on which the Caananite might also
build.
A second view of the mission of Judaism is that
which regards it as having had its function in the
proclaiming of moral law. That it did proclaim moral
law is certain; but this was by no means its distine-
tive message. If the record of Genesis bears witness
to the fact that the knowledge of God was earlier
than the national existence, the record of Exodus
equally attests that the knowledge of morality pre-
ceded the national law. At whatever time the
thunders of Sinai proclaimed “Thou shalt not kill,
thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness
300 Messages of the Old Religions.
against thy neighbour,” they appealed to an already
existing culture. Laws have no meaning except on
the supposition that the subjects of them are respon-
sible beings. A moral code never founded morality;
it is itself the evidence of the previous existence
of morality. Judea only got from Sinai what she
brought to Sinai — a conscience. Whence did she
derive it 2 From Egypt. 2 No ; from human na-
ture. But undoubtedly she recognised it in Egypt
before she recognised it in Sinai. Egypt was her
first looking-glass, the earliest mirror in which she
beheld herself. Here she saw a morality in many
respects kindred to her own. Renouf has not
scrupled to say that the morality of Egypt contains
every Christian virtue." It is true, there is a leaning
rather to the negative than to the positive side; there
is more stress laid on what we are not, than on what
we are to do. The man who at the day of judgment
is able to disclaim the commission of forty-two sins
is permitted to pass into glory. But it must be con-
fessed that Judea herself leans to this tendency; her
decalogue is mainly negative, whether as regards
man or as regards God. To acknowledge none equal
to the God of Israel, to abstain from bowing down
to graven images, to avoid irreverence in the use of
the holy name, to keep from Secular thoughts at
sacred times, and, in general, to restrain the heart
1 ‘Hibbert Lectures (1879) on the Origin and Growth of Religion,
as illustrated by the Religion of Egypt,” p. 71.
The Message of Judea. 301
and the hand from doing injury to a brother man,—
these are main tenets of her moral law. And neither
in her case nor in the case of Egypt is the explana-
tion far to seek. It lies in an ultimate law of the
mind of man. Conscience only begins with an act
of prohibition; it does not exist until we do wrong.
I know nothing of good health till I have felt my
first physical pain; before that time good health is k
my nature, and no man recognises his nature. To
be recognised, it must be broken, sickness must
come, disease must come, the vision of death must
come. So is it with holiness; it is only revealed in
the breaking. That is why Egypt, that is why Judea,
has seen the power of morality rather in that which
forbids than in that which impels; they have sought
her on the threshold, and the threshold is an act of
prohibition. Yet the threshold is neither in Egypt nor
in Judea, but in the heart of man. It is older than
Pgypt, it is older than Judea, for it belongs to the
life of the soul, and is therefore distinctive of no land.
A third view is that which regards Judaism as
having had for its mission to reveal the ways of
Providence. Now, it cannot be denied that the life
of Judea is a marvellous illustration of the exist-
ence of a Power that IIIäkes for righteousness.
Whatever be the Order of that life, whether it be the
old traditional Order recognised by our fathers or
the new sequence proposed by the light of modern
criticism, the result is the same. It matters not to
302 Messages of the Old Religions. “A
the question in hand whether we say that the law
preceded the prophets, or that the prophets pre-
ceded the law; on either view the central fact re-
mains unaffected. We see a nation, of very insig.
nificant extent, of very circumscribed position, of
very limited natural resources, assuming a command-
ing, and ultimately a dominant, attitude on the
earth. Without large armies, without much wealth,
without a knowledge of Secular philosophy, with-
out those arts of polish and fineS36 which constitute
the astute statesman, this little nation has aimed
at and virtually received universal dominion. She
has set up an ideal of world-conquest most power-
fully asserted in the days of her deepest calamity;
and, in a way she never dreamed of, she has carried
it through. As a matter of fact, she has given to
the world a life which has ruled all civilised nations
—a life after whose pattern and model all other lives
have sought to mould themselves. Nor is it less
remarkable that the life by which she has conquered
has not been her own ideal of greatness, has been in
direct antagonism to that ideal. She has repudiated
the crown which has made her despotic, she has
abjured the weapon which has proved her victorious.
All this seems to denote a force beyond herself. It
seems to indicate the presence and the Superintend-
ence of a divine instinct which, as with the bee, has
led, by a series of undesigned acts, to the construc.
tion of a kingdom of consummate order,
The Message of Judea. 303
But when all has been said, we must still ask, Is
this the message of the nation ? Is it not rather
its completed result, its exit, its terminus ' When
this result came, did not the nation as a nation cease
to be 2 Can we say that its function was only to
come with its death, that its use was only to be dis-
covered in the hour of its dissolution ? Had it no
value for its time, no meaning for the thousand years
during which it had a local habitation as well as a
name * Did it differ from all other lands in being
without an influence on its contemporaries 2 Had
if, in short, no place in history as long as its own
history lasted, and only the office of giving a lesson
to posterity when the curtain had fallen over its own
career ? This we cannot believe. It is contrary to
nature; it is contrary to analogy. It is contradicted
even by the continued life of the people without a
country—a people who have refused to accept the
conclusion derived from their national drama, and
have denied its final act to be a part of their des-
tiny. We must look elsewhere for a solution of
the problem, What is the message of the Jewish
nation ?
If we would find that solution, we must look for
the most pervading element in the records of the
Hebrew race. What is that which from beginning
to end permeates its literature most persistently and
most unwaveringly 3 Clearly it must be something
of a Semitic caste. I said in the previous chapter
304 Messages of the Old Religions.
that the Semite is distinguished from the Aryan by
the predominance of the sense of mystery. We saw
that the mystery of Egypt was virtually the mystery
of evolution—the process by which one thing passes
into another thing. What is the mystery of Judea 3
Let us listen to one of the latest voices of the nation,
and I think we shall find the clue for which we are
Searching. In the first Epistle to Timothy we read,
“Great is the mystery of godliness.” The words
bore a different meaning then to what they do now,
and they must be paraphrased, not translated. A
mystery then meant something invisible—something
which could not be detected by the sense. The
mystery of godliness, therefore, is equivalent to the
wnSeemness of godliness; it really amounts to the
statement that the path by which we approach the
throne of God is the path of the internal. According
to this writer, the great message of Judea is the
power of inwardness in the religious life. Now, if
we fall backward and examine the earlier voices, we
shall find that they present a wonderful consistency.
We shall find that the power of the internal is the
thought on which the Old Testament rings its
changes from morn to noon, from noon to dewy
eve. It is the moral of all its history, the secret of
all its poetry, the burden of all its song. It covers
the whole area of its teaching; it permeates the
entire course of its development; it runs in a con-
tinuous refrain through its endless variations. Other
The Message of Judea. 305
messages may vary with the hour, other thoughts
may be modified with the place; but this is indepen-
dent of time and impervious to locality; it is the
same yesterday and to-day and for ever.
Perhaps at the OutSet One is disposed to be struck
with the paradox of such a statement. We have
been in the habit of regarding the message of Judea
as antagonistic to the message of Christianity. We
hear the first Christian teachers distinguishing be-
tween the flesh and the spirit, and Calling men to
abandon the mean and beggarly elements of the
letter. We naturally conclude that Judaism musf
have been a most external faith, and her message a
most sensuous hope. But we forget altogether that
the men who thus denounce the letter are themselves
Jews. The voice of the New Testament is not
One nation calling against another; it is a nation
summoning itself. The disciple of Christ is crying
to his countryman, Be true to yourselves, true to
your message, true to your national ideal. It is no
new voice; it is the cry of all the prophets. What
is Jewish prophecy but a great protest in favour of
return to the national ideal 2 It reminds the men of
Israel that, in seeking the flesh in preference to the
spirit, they ale deselling Uleil U W 11 slaludard alld
abandoning their own landmarks; that is the reason
why their watchword is so constantly “return.” It
is a going back to the primitive type which the
prophets of Israel desired; and that primitive type
U
306 Messages of the Old Religions.
is believed to have its root in a recognition of the
things that are unseen. -
The only question is, Were they right in their
belief ? T)oes an examination of the Hebrew writ-
ings lead to the conviction that they are based on a
preference for the internal 2 There are four distinct
departments under which the life of the Jew may
be considered—his history, his theology, his poetry,
and his morality. Let us look at these one by one.
And first, By the history, I mean of course the
recorded history. I have here nothing to do with
the putting right of the Hebrew annals; I leave
that to the latest criticism. We have only to con-
sider the account these annals give of themselves,
and thence to determine the message which they
design to convey. Now on their very threshold
there is a remarkable narrative, popularly called the
story of the Fall. We are familiar with it theologi-
cally; but what is it artistically,–in other words,
what is the actual picture which it presents In
plain language, it is simply the vision of a man who
gets his choice between the internal and the external,
and who prefers the latter. We see a tree of know-
ledge desired, not because it was a tree of knowledge,
but because it was pleasant to the sight and good for
food, and eligible for the reputation it conferred of
being wise. As a form of life knowledge itself is
not prized; it is only prized as a form of display.
The tree of life — the other central growth of the
The Message of Judea. 307
garden—is never forbidden, but it is never coveted.
It is uncoveted simply because it is inward. With
the primitive man, as with his descendants, the effect
is a greater object of interest than the cause, and the
thing which is produced more valuable than that
which produced it. In this fine allegory there is
no anachronism ; the essence of human nature is
revealed once for all. The Hebrew race in this
story has put its hand on its own imperfection and
the imperfection of humanity; but the power to
discover one's imperfection is already a sign that we
have passed beyond it. The Hebrew has admitted
his own failure, but in the very act he has revealed
the strength of his ideal; his narrative of the Fall
is his first protest in favour of the inner life.
The second remarkable narrative in the Hebrew
annals brings out the same principle in a different
form; it is the call of Abraham. Here again we
have an act of choice. True, it is no longer the
direct choice between the outward and the inward;
it is rather the alternative between two kinds of
physical good. There stand before the eyes of Abra-
ham two prospects—a land in present possession, and
a land which can only be possessed in the future,
and as the result of Inucli LUil. Yet the choice of
Abraham is indirectly the same as the choice of the
primitive Adam. However outward the coming land
may have been, it was to him as yet a thing of ima-
gination alone. The approach to it was compassed
308 Messages of the Old Religions.
by Seeming impossibilities. He could only begin to
journey towards it by closing his eyes to everything
around him, by shutting out from his sight all that
was present or palpable. He had to leave his country,
his kindred, his home, to part from the associations
of his youth, to abandon the worship of his ancestors,
and to travel into a region to him utterly unknown,
and presenting to his view not a single avenue of
approach. The writer to the Hebrews has caught
the true moral of the story when he places this man
among the heroes of faith; he feels that such a choice
was essentially a choice of the internal. The faith
of Abraham has become a proverbial phrase; why
so 2 Because faith is the sight of the internal. Abra-
ham had other qualities on which tradition might
well have fastened; he had courage, and chivalry,
and generosity, and fidelity, and, above all, the spirit
of sacrificial love. But in the mind of the world all
these fall into the background before the radiant fact
that he followed an aim which was invisible. They
are overshadowed in the presence of a life which
abandons to-day for to-morrow, and leaves the bread
of the hour for something which can yield its interest
Only in an age to come.
Now, let us observe, this type of character is pre-
served throughout the history of the Jewish nation
—preserved consciously and deliberately as the dis-
tinctive feature of the national mind. How often
are the words repeated, “I am the God of Abraham ”?
The Message of Judea. 309
And what do they mean but simply this, that the
rise or fall of the nation is to be estimated by the
height of its faith ? Luther said that justification by
faith was the doctrine of a standing or of a falling
Church; the Jewish scriptures say that justification
by faith is the doctrine of a standing or of a falling
State. The Old Testament measures all its heroes by
their power to resist the external; to postpone the
impression of the hour. Take Jacob and Esau. Why
is the former preferred to the latter? The bold
hunter had many qualities which were not shared by
the sleek shepherd. But the shepherd excelled him
in one thing—the power to withstand the influence
of the moment. Esau sells his birthright for a mess
of pottage; he prefers the visible to the invisible.
Jacob sells the pottage for the birthright; he prefers
the bird in the bush to that in the hand. What was
that birthright ! It was the heirship to an uncer-
tainty, so far as human knowledge was concerned.
It was the right to search for gold in an undiscovered
country, to assume a title for which the world as yet
had no place; the man who could do this was a man
of faith. Or, take Moses. His was a life of great
eventfulness. It began in the burning aspirations of
Midian, and it ended in the shadowless retrospect of
Nebo. It was a life of thunders and lightnings, such
as poet and painter would have longed to portray.
Yet, to the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, its
moral is all summed up in one word—inwardness.
310 Messages of the Old Religions.
To him the glory of Moses is that “he esteemed the
reproach of Christ greater riches than all the treasures
of Egypt.” It is by his meekness that this man has
inherited the earth; it is his gentleness that makes
him great. He follows the long instead of the short
road to the land of Canaan, and he endures “as see-
ing Him who is invisible.” Or, take Solomon—the
type of the national wealth and magnificence. In
the most brilliant period of the country's annals, in
the age when the appetite for war had been stimu-
lated by conquest, and the lust for money had been
quickened by luxury, he is represented as making
his choice in favour of the inward riches. It is the
One element which connects the meridian of Jewish
history with its dawn. Between the patriarchal and
the regal age there is little sympathy; the king
that has risen knows not Joseph. But amid all the
changes in government and polity and life, amid the
passing away of the old and the emerging of the new,
one thing remains constant, unwavering, ever green ;
it is that which constituted the distinctiveness of the
nation's youth, and continues to constitute the dis-
tinctiveness of its manhood, the Search for gold
below the surface, the choice of the internal.
Here I take leave of the historical aspect of the
nation. I have given only a few specimens, but they
are specimens not of a part but of the whole. They
are representative of the Jewish commonwealth, and
I know not a single exception to their message. The
The Message of Judea. 3.11
moral of all Jewish history is that the elder should
serve the younger—that the natural man, who comes
first, should be superseded by the spiritual man, who
comes last. This is the burden of all its teaching
from the beginning to the end. Cain and Abel,
Isaac and Ishmael, Joseph and Reuben, Saul and
David, are only landmarks of a tendency that runs
along the whole line of the national life. There are
evidences that it was not unopposed by the nation,
there are traces that it had to be taught by stern ex-
perience. Eve says of her firstborn, Cain, “I have
gotten a man from the Lord ; ” and Abraham prays
for the more warlike of his sons, “O that Ishmael
might live before Thee.” But none the less, nay,
all the more, is it the message of the children of
Israel. If it is not the result of estheticism, if it is
not the fruit of inborn admiration, if it has persisted
through opposition and survived in spite of prejudice,
it furnishes only an additional proof that Judea was
impelled by a destiny higher than her own will.
312 Messages of the Old Religions.
CHAPTER XV.
THE SUBJECT CONTINUED,
THE second point of interest in the life of Judea is
its theology. And in its theology as in its history,
the central article is inwardness. That article is
expressed in the second commandment of the Jewish
law, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven
image, nor any likeness of anything that is in
heaven above nor in the earth beneath nor in the
waters under the earth; thou shalt not bow down
thyself to them nor serve them.” The command is
more comprehensive than is popularly supposed. It
includes two parts. On the One hand, the Jew is
forbidden to make a reverential likeness of any
object of creation; on the other, he is forbidden to
make any object of creation a likeness of God
Himself. The design is therefore to prevent both
idolatry and nature-worship — in other words, to
exclude from the true faith all symbolism what-
soever, You will observe at once the analogy and
the difference between this and Egypt. Egypt, like
The Message of Judea. 313
#:
Judea, has no special symbol of God, but why?
Just that the whole universe may be His symbol.
To the Egyptian the important part of every object
is the point where it fades into another object; the
image of God must to him be the world as a whole.
But to the Jew not even this was to be God’s
image; God was to have no image." The heaven of
heavens could not contain Him; He charged His
very angels with folly. To the eye of the lawgiver,
as to the eye of the psalmist, the aspect of united
nature was but one of the changes in the vesture of
the Eternal; he would say of a thousand universes,
“They perish, but Thou remainest; they all wax old
as doth a garment, and as a Vesture shalt Thou fold
them up, and they shall be changed; but Thou art
the same, and Thy years shall have no end.”
I would not have it thought, however, that the
Hebrew notion of God was one of impersonality;
this is one of the points in which, I think, Mr
Matthew Arnold has erred. The creed of Judaism
is a protest in favour of an inward God; but to the
Jew inward meant human. Let us never forget
that the act forbidden to him was not the con-
ceiving of God after a likeness, but the conceiving
of God after the likeness of a thing. The roof of
Jewish religion is placed in the belief that man was
made in the image of God. If man is not to image
God, it is because he is not to stoop below himself.
* Compare Isaiah xl. 18.
314 Messages of the Old Religions.
He contains within himself the inward principle,
and that principle is not only God-given but God-
breathed; it is itself an integral part of the life of
the Eternal. Judaism is not so far from Christianity
as is commonly supposed. It is founded on the
identity of the human and the divine. The distance
is one of miles, not of nature. If the Creator is
placed beyond the direct reach of the creature, it is
in the same sense that a king is beyond the direct
reach of a peasant. There is never such a distance
as would make mind one thing in God and another
thing in man. To the son of Israel the mind of
man was the miniature of the mind of God. To
him the divinest thing in the universe was will—
the innermost force, the force behind nature, the
force that can say “Thou shalt; thou shalt not.”
The image of God in man was the power of choice.
When the soul received its first alternative, it
received its first likeness to the divine ; for that
which unites the human to the divine is the voice
of personality—the power to say “I will.” Hence
to the son of Israel the voice and not the form
becomes the likeness of God.” “The Lord saith” is
the formula which expresses the Jewish sense of the
nature of God. The Greek would have clothed Him
in all the glories of the morning; but to the Hebrew
the glories of the morning were nothing to the glory
of personality. What the Jew magnified in God
1 See specially Psalm xxix.
The Message of Judea. 315
was His law. It was not merely that it was a
moral law, but that it was a law—an expression of
will, a voice of command. The prerogative of God
was to reign, and the majesty of reigning lay in its
manifestation of a will. Hence to the Jew the most
glorious of all things became the possession of a
kingdom. His most secular life had its root in his
most religious, in his most internal life. He sought
a kingdom not from ambition but from veneration
—to be like God. If his God had been a represen-
tative of beauty, he would have carved statues in
His praise; but his God is a representative of will,
and therefore he carves for Him a kingdom. His
search for universal empire is in its root an act of
worship—the worship of the innermost thing in
human nature, contemplated as the likeness of the
divine Life.
I cannot quit this part of the Subject without
pointing out that nowhere has Judaism been so
little superannuated as in this worship of the will.
It is the one point in which modern Science can still
unite itself with theological study. This science is
in its essence a recognition of Force as the supreme
entity. Force is a mental conception. It is an idea
dorivod from the exercise of will, and derivable from
no other source. If there be an ultimate force in
the universe, so far as our present knowledge ex-
tends, it can only be a will force. When I speak of
the power of gravity, the power of cohesion—nay,
316 Messages of the Old Religions.
even the power of motion — what do I mean :
Have I not simply transferred a mental thought to
a physical object 7 I know nothing of power in
nature except as suggested by my own consciousness.
The very idea of cause is a mental idea. Mr Mill is
quite right when he says that from the sight of
nature alone we get nothing but antecedents and
consequents. If I put my hand to the light of a
taper, it is burned ; but if I say that the taper had
power to burn my hand, I have gone beyond the
facts of mere nature. I have put into the taper the
analogy of my own spirit, and have conceived it
after the likeness of man. So is it with the concep-
tion of force. It is a conception rather of theology
than of science. It is a clothing of the universe in
the likeness of the human Soul. It is a regress
towards that creed of the man of Israel which
placed in the centre of all things the movements
of a personal will.
The third distinctive element in the life of the
Jewish nation is its poetry. In the introduction to
this volume, I have defined poetry to be the incar-
nation of truth—the clothing of one thing in the
vesture of another thing. In Judaism the thing
which is clothed is the immermost force of life—the
nation's religious faith. Do not imagine that when
I speak of the poetic character of the Hebrew mind,
I limit the phrase to the works of an Isaiah or a
Jeremiah. To me the poetry of the Old Testament
The Message of Judea. 317
is interwoven with its history. On any view, even
on the most orthodox view, the facts are not the
revelation; they are only the symbols of the revela-
tion. The poetry lies in the thought beneath the
form, or rather in the symmetry with which the
thought eaſpresses the form. Where lies the charm,
the unique charm, of the narratives of the Old Testa-
ment What is that which has made them delight-
ful to the Sabbath-school child and interesting to the
grave philosopher ? It is that in them which lurks
below the colouring. It is not their local or national
element; it is the fact that the garb of the nation
conceals something which is not local, not limited,
not geographical,—something which has enshrined
itself in a temporary form, but which is itself con-
temporaneous with all time and independent of any
space, the possession of the world, and the property
of man as man. -
A moment's glance at One or two of these nar-
ratives will make this abundantly clear. What, for
example, is the poetic beauty of the story of the
Fall? Is it the statement that the sin of the human
race began with a trivial act on the surface On
the contrary, it is the statement that this trivial act
was not a beginning at all but an ending, that when
the sin came to the commonplace surface of life it
came to its climax. This is the thought which has
been incarnated in the old story of Eden, and it is
a thought as modern to the Englishman as to the
3.18 Messages of the Old Religions.
Jew. We are made to feel that the overt act is the
least culpable part of the process, that it is only the
last result of a long series of mental errors. We are
made to See, in the most subtle manner, that ere ever
the human Soul disobeyed it had learnt to distrust;
that before it violated the existing law it had come
to think of the Lawgiver as one who was jealous of
His creatures. Mr Browning could have expressed
no better a very abstruse thought. It is indeed a
thought which belongs essentially to his line of
poetry, and even its expression has somewhat of his
ring. It is a keen analysis of human nature, given
in the form of allegory. The figures move before us
in the siniplest garb, and use very few words. If
you would understand their meaning, you must read
between the lines. If you would penetrate the depth
of the dramatic situation, you must come to the
scene with an already rich human nature, amply
stored with worldly experience. The narrative is
poetic and childlike, but it is the reverse of childish.
It is the artlessness which conceals art. It is the
poetry of reflection, not of spontaneous impulse. On
what professes to be the threshold of the national
history, it asserts once for all the message of the
nation. It is a Song not for the sake of singing, but
for the sake of morals. It is sung with a purpose,
and, though it decks itself in all the leaves of the
garden, that purpose is not beauty. It is a song
whose object is not sense but Soul, not charm but
The Message of Judea. 3.19
chastity, not radiance but righteousness. It has sur-
vived the scene, even the imagination of the scene,
in which it had its birth; it has been eternal because
it has been internal.
Again. The sacrifice of Abraham is one of the
most picturesque narratives which have ever been
written. It has appealed to all nations, to all ages,
to all circumstances. Yet where lies the poetry of
that narrative 2 Clearly in the fact that the sacrifice
was an internal one. If Abraham had really offered
his son, the picture would have been revoltingly
unpoetical, The beauty lies in the knowledge that
the offering was never outwardly accepted, that the
will was taken for the deed. Here we have a
heroism of a singular kind—a man who has the
merit of doing everything without actually doing
anything. It is a heroism in which the combatant
wrestles not against flesh and blood, but against the
Solicitations of his own mind. The battle-field is
inward, the weapons are inward, the warfare is in-
ward. It is a conflict that has no spectators, and
for whose decision there can be no wreath. On
every side the poetry of the narrative depends on
the shifting of the scene from the world without to
the world within. IIeaven must receive the offering
from earth only in a figure;’ reality would make
the record worse than prosaic. Man must be taught
the lesson that there may be a divine sacrifice which
* Compare Hebrews xi. 19.
320 Messages of the Old Religions.
gives no material gift, and that the deepest surrender
of the soul is in that moment when its love can find
no expression. It is a point of high significance
that the clothing of this thought in symbolism
should have been reserved for the inspiration of a
race whose message was the power of the internal.
Take one instance more—the vision which Moses
beheld of a bush that burned and was not consumed.
Where lies the poetry of this symbol '! Is it in
the fact of its marvellousness? Certainly not. The
appeal which it makes is not to the eye but to the
heart. The poetry consists in its being a symbol not
of that which is rare, but of that which is constant
and abiding. It points to a law of the inner life.
It tells Moses that the best preservative from being
consumed is that very fire which he dreads; that the
soul is kept alive by its own burning. This, and not
the wonder, is the poetry of the scene. It is a call
to the future leader to enter into the enthusiasm
of love, with a promise that this enthusiasm will
rob the cares of life of the power to make him old.
And the promise is declared to have been most
wonderfully fulfilled in that last hour of the law-
giver's pilgrimage, in which, amid the shadows of age,
he stood on the heights of Pisgah and surveyed the
coming land with an eye that was not dim and a
natural strength that was not abated. The vision of
Mount Pisgah and the vision of the burning bush
are one. They both sing the same song—the triumph
The Message of Judea. 321
of the inward over the outward, the conquest of the
fires of earth by the fire of the soul. They tell of a
fiery furnace which, if only sufficiently heated, will
preserve without hurt those that are cast therein,
and which, so far from adding to the chains of life,
will cause many for the first time to walk cumberless
and free.
I regard, therefore, the poetry of the Bible as
something which is inextricably bound up in its
history, and which teaches the same lesson as its
history—the subservience of the form to the spirit.
If we look at those Old Testament writings which in
a special Sense are called poetic, we shall find pre-
cisely the same experience. If I were asked to lay
my hand on the thing which above all others charac-
terises these writings, I would say “inwardness.” It
may seem a bold statement, but I do not at present
know a single passage in these writings which deals
with outward nature for its own sake. There is a
sacred poetry which begins with nature and then
rises to nature's God; but Judea is not content with
that. She begins with God, continues with God, and
ends with God. I look in vain for any instance in
which the eye of her poet rests on beauty for itself
alone. He considers the heavens, bul, it is as the
work of God’s hands; he views the earth, but it is as
God’s footstool; he contemplates the winds, but it
is as God's ministers; he studies the stars, but it is
as God’s host; he hears the thunder, but it is as
|X
322 Messages of the Old Religions.
God’s voice. There are passages in the book of Job
as majestically descriptive of nature as anything in
literature; but none of them is introduced for its
own sake. They are hung upon the fringe of an
argument whose decision belongs to another region,
and whose interest conceals from the reader's view
the form and the beauty of all earthly things. It
has often been said that the Hebrew had a very
limited notion of the size of the universe. I would
ask, Of what universe 2 If the visible universe be
meant, the saying is true; but the same is true even
of the modern telescope. What we mean by the
universe is, after all, very much what the Jew meant
—a vast, unseen Something of which we only behold
the edges. The modern calls the unseen thing
“Nature,” the Jew called it “ God.” But both are
alike agreed that, in the presence of its vast and in-
comprehensible expanse, the universe comprised by
the human eye is indeed infinitely small. Therefore
it is that in the Hebrew poetry the visible has only
a secondary place. The Hebrew worships the unseen
side of nature, and the unseen side of nature to him
is God. The seeming limitation of his view is itself
a proof of his large imagining; his poetry has been
inspired by his sense of the internal.
I come now to the fourth department in which the
Imessage of Judea is illustrated—its morality. What
is the difference between the morality of Egypt and
the morality of Judea 2 I would not say that the
The Message of Judea. 323
latter is higher than the former; I think that in form
they are very much alike. But the difference lies here.
The morality of Egypt is stimulated by the rewards
and punishments of a life beyond the grave; the mor-
ality of Judea has no motive beyond the day and hour.
And to say this is to say a great deal more. It is to
say that, for the large amount of his moral actions,
the Jew had no motive even in the day and hour. It
is true that in the state of Israel, as in other states,
there were penalties attached to the commission of
crime. But crime is a very small part of sin. The
root of moral evil is in the heart, and the heart can
have no magistrate over it; to itself it stands or falls.
If the future be not seen, the visible present has little
power. The outward law may say, “Thou shalt not
kill,” “thou shalt not steal,” “ thou shalt not bear
false witness”; but what outward law can say, “Thou
shalt be holy,” “thou shalt be just,” “thou shalt be
good”? Who can penetrate into the secret places of
a man's Soul and read his silent moments 2 And if,
in spite of this absence of outward law, there were
men in Israel who were holy and just and good, if,
notwithstanding the silence from without, there were
those that could walk through the mire and keep
their garments unspotted, it furnishes an indisput-
able proof that the force which impelled them was
the power of the internal. *
To my mind, indeed, the spectacle of Jewish
morality is the grandest thing in the world. We
324. Messages of the Old Religions.
see a nation living in order to be a nation—in-
fluenced in its deepest life by no other motive than
the love of country and the transmission of a pure
name. It is highly significant of its character, that
among the statutes of its moral life there is said to
be only one “commandment with promise,” only one
precept to which there is attached an outward re-
ward, “Honour thy father and thy mother, that
thy days may be long in the land which the Lord
thy God giveth thee.” Is even this a command with
individual promise ? No. It is not the man but
the nation that is addressed as thou. The length
of days to which the Israelite looks forward is a
duration not for himself, but for his kingdom—a
duration in which his family shall be perpetuated.
from age to age, and his institutions extended from
shore to shore. Such a motive as this had nothing
of self in it; it had patriotism, it had family affec-
tion, but it had no self. The man who had accepted
it had relinquished the thought of his own being,
had ceased to view himself as anything more than
the member of another life. He had entered into
one of the sublimest Self-surrenders, into One of the
completest sacrifices conceivable by human nature
or expressible in human history—a Sacrifice of which
Christianity itself is the climax, and of which Chris-
tian aspiration is the mirror. The most spiritual
and the most sacrificial of all systems has justly
found its root in the life of a nation where the
The Message of Judea. 3.25
part has been impelled to surrender itself to the
whole.
And what is the power by which this surrender
has been made 2 It is the power of morality itself,
without extraneous aid. It is this which constitutes
the distinctive feature of the Jewish ethics. The
son of Israel neither looked forward nor looked
backward; he looked in. The Parsee had his hope
of a consummated glory; the Buddhist had his Nir-
vana of coming rest; but the Jew was influenced by
the hope neither of immortality nor of forgetfulness.
He was impelled hy fine strength of an inward pres-
ent. The voice of conscience had to him no voice
to compete with it ; it ruled without a rival and
without a second. It issued its absolute mandates,
“thou shalt”; “thou shalt not ”; from its law there
could be no swerving, and from its verdict there
could be no appeal. In that attitude Judea stands
unique and alone, a spectacle to all ages and an
example to all times. She is the one witness in
the world to the inherent majesty of moral law.
She tells the human race that, beneath the thunder
and the earthquake and the fire, there is a still Small
voice which is more potent than all, a voice that can
neither strive nor cry, but is mighly ill ils callu, clear
decidedness. The voice is still speaking in the wil-
derness. Driven from her home, stripped of her
glory, denuded of her kingdom, spoiled of her
priestly robes, deprived of her place among the
3.26 Messages of the Old Religions.
nations, Judea still lives by the echoes of her voice,
still exercises authority by the mandate of that
inner conscience which, amid the dearth of stars
and systems, says from within the veil, “Let there
be light.”
Christianity and the Messages of the Past. 327
CHAPTER XVI.
CONCLUSION: CHRISTIANITY AND THE MESSAGES
OF THE PAST.
I HAVE not given a separate chapter to the message
of Christianity, because by the title of this book I
limited myself to the religions older than it. All
the phases of faith I have taken up have their origin
in a much remoter past, with the exception perhaps
of the Teuton; but even the Teuton has long since
passed away, and Christianity is still green. I have
therefore excluded from formal treatment the bit of
ground on which I stand, and have made it rather
the pivot of observation than itself a thing to be
observed. Now, however, that we have completed
Our Survey, it is not inexpedient to ask what is the
Christian message as distinguished from these other
messages. That is a point on which we are not left
in doubt. In all other cases we have to search the
records for their purpose; but here the purpose is
revealed by the religion itself. Christianity declares
that its mission to the world is one of reconciliation.
328 Messages of the Old Religions.
No religion has ever before claimed to be the bearer
of such a message. Neither Brahman, nor Buddhist,
nor Parsee, nor Jew, nor Greek, ever aspired to such
a destiny. The nearest approach to the aspiration
came from the Roman, who aimed, as we have seen,
at the incorporation of all things within his own
state. But incorporation is not reconciliation. The
problem of the Roman could be solved by geography;
it placed heterogeneous things side by side, and left
them heterogeneous still. But the religion of Christ
is not anxious to put things locally together, nor
even to make them similar in appearance. It seeks
to reconcile them in their differences, – to make
them, in the very midst of their diversity, work out
one common end. It is not eager for uniformity,
not solicitous for the recognition of one mode of
government, not desirous that all should think on
the same plane; it desires that the air may run
through the variations, that the diversity of gifts may
enfold a unity of the spirit.
Is it possible that the religions of the past may
themselves be included in this message of recon-
ciliation ? Is it conceivable that Christianity has
furnished a ground for peace not only within but
without its own fold? Paul says that in Christ
“all things stand together ”; and it is a most re-
markable statement. It seems to suggest that the
angles of opposing faiths are rubbed off when they
stand in the Christian temple, and that ideas once
Christianity and the Messages of the Past. 329
mutually conflicting can there rest side by side. Do
not misunderstand me. I do not for a moment
imagine that the first Christians said to themselves,
“We shall found a religion which shall embrace the
faiths of the world.” I do not suppose that any one
of these disciples had ever heard of Brahmanism, or
Buddhism, or Parsism. But this does not even touch
the question. These religions are representative of
certain ideas which belong to human nature. If a
religion appears which professes to be a universal
faith, it must show its universality by uniting these
ideas. It must be a ladder reaching from earth unto
heaven, each of whose ascending steps shall find a
place for one of the systems of the past. Instead of
being manifested to reveal the falsity of former views,
it must, for the first time, vindicate the truth of all,
—must discover a point in which beliefs hitherto
deemed at variance may lie down together in unity,
and receive from the heart of man a common justi-
fication. Let us see whether the religion of Christ
will furnish such a meeting-place for the messages
of the nations. *
In the order of nature the starting-point is the land
of Egypt. The message of Egypt, it will be remem-
bered, was the mystery of the boundary-line—the
reverence for the spot where one life passes into
another. Is there anything in the Christian doctrine
which corresponds to this thought ! There is. What
do we mean by the word “aspiration " ? Neither
330 Messages of the Old Religions.
more nor less than the Egyptian meant. Aspiration
is simply the effort of one life to pass over into
another, to be something other than itself. Christian
aspiration is just the Soul looking over the boundary-
line,—contemplating a life beyond the limits of its
own personality, and longing to be like it. Man sees
in the glass a figure besides himself, and feels himself
passing toward that figure. It has more attraction
for him than the form which he actually wears, more
control over his movements, more influence over his
mind. “I live, yet not I,” are the words in which
Paul expresses the sense of Christian aspiration. It
is the riddle of the Sphinx in the sphere of the gospel.
Two lives shoot out from one stem—the one popu-
larly called the real, the other the ideal. One is
animal, the other human ; One natural, the other
spiritual; one at the beginning, the other at the end.
While the man yet dwells in the one, he can look out
at the window and gaze at the other. He has the
power to pass beyond his boundary, to open the case-
ment that encloses him, and rejoice in the anticipation.
of a life that is not yet come. There is a place for
ancient Egypt in the Pantheon of modern Christianity.
But let us go a step further. This desire after
another life could not have existed unless by nature
that life had been already ours. No man can aspire
to anything that has not at Some time been his: His
longing may be only the result of ancestral descent;
but ancestral descent is itself a form of possession.
Christianity and the Messages of the Past. 331
And so, on the steps of the Christian ladder, we pass
from Egypt into India, from the vision of the Sphinx
to the creed of the Brahman. The message of Brah-
manism, as we found, was the soul's life in God, the
proclamation of the truth that the highest reality of
things lay above the forms that are seen and tem-
poral. Now, this is precisely the doctrine of Chris-
tianity. It proclaims that aspiration is itself God in
the soul. Why is it that in the system of Christ
such peculiar value is attached to the act of prayer ?
It is because the desire of God is the memory of God.
Tn any spiritual sphere no man can seek more than
he was born to. If he asks for God, it is a proof that
he has come from God; his want is itself his birth-
right, his weakness is his strength. It is here that
the gospel of Christ meets with the creed of the
Brahman. It declares that in his very destitution,
by reason of the very sense of his destitution, man is
proved to be divine, on a level with that for which
he prays; so that the Founder of Christianity Him-
self has not scrupled to say, “ Whatsoever things ye
have need of, believe that ye receive them, and ye
have received them.” The Christian has excelled the
Brahman in the boldness of his claims. He has
declared that his life is already hid with God, that
he is even now risen from the grave, that he has
passed from death unto life, that he is a citizen of
the upper world, that he is seated at God’s right
hand in the heavenly places, that the divine Life is
332 Messages of the Old Religions.
at this moment dwelling within him. And so vivid
is this consciousness, that to him, as to the Brahman,
there are times in which every other life is felt to be
a shadow, in which this world appears to be but a
vain show, but a blaze of stage-scenery, with no pre-
sent reality and not even a lengthened semblance of
reality. What is it that prevents him from going
straight to the Brahman's conclusion, and regarding
this earthly state as an idle dream 7
It is because Christianity here passes from Brah-
manism into Parsism. You remember the message
of Parsism. It told the world that the shadows
which dim the vision of eternity are no dreams, that
they are the result of an intense reality—something
which has gone wrong in the mechanism of the moral
universe. And here Christianity takes up the Par-
see's story. It tells me that I dare not regard this
scene of time as a Series of delusions, dare not per-
suade myself that I have entered into rest. I have
not entered into rest. However much I wish it,
however strongly I aspire after it, there is something
which holds me back and impedes the movement of
my wing. I call it sin, but it matters not much what
we call it ; it is there, and it is no dream. In this
the ancient Parsee * and the Christian are at one.
They both emphasise the tremendous reality of the
* I use the expression “ancient Parsee” advisedly; modern
Parsism has entirely deserted the distinctive tenet of the old reli-
gion—its recognition of two Powers.
Christianity and the Messages of the Past. 333
hindrance to the moral life of man. They both rec-
ognise the fact that there is a twofold nature in the
human soul—a law in the members warring against
the law of the mind, an antagonism of the spirit to
the flesh, and of the flesh to the spirit. They both,
in accents equally piercing, reveal the same great
burden and utter the same great cry, “Oh wretched
man that I am who shall deliver me from this body
of death 2 °
But with the utterance of that cry Parsism and
Christianity part company. With neither is the cry
one of despair; yet their ground of hope is different.
Parsism looks forward; its hope is for a golden
future. But Christianity's first glance is turned
backward. The darkest cloud it sees is not in
the future but in the past. It feels that, before
it can advance into anything golden, it must re-
trace its steps to undo something in the bygone
years. It is here that, as I have pointed out in
an earlier chapter of this book, the religion of
Christ finds a place for another and a very different
religion—the faith of the Chinese empire. We
have seen how that empire, Spite of its materialism,
and notwithstanding its utilitarianism, has been
unable LU rest, ill the hour. Wo havo Soon how it
has been unable even to rest in the prospect of a
coming hour. It has sought redemption not so
much by the advent of something new as by the
clearing away of Something old. It aims to get
3.34. ' Messages of the Old Religions.
back to the morning that is past, not forward to
the morning that is coming. Corruptions have
gathered during the day; abuses have accumulated
in the circling of the Suns. No future morning
will avail to wipe these out ; each brighter sun
will make them only more evident. The shadow
itself must be rolled backward on the dial; the
past must be unspoken, the word must be unsaid.
Here, as I have indicated, is the place in the
Christian Pantheon in which the Chinese empire
can stand. She is unlike everything else in Asia;
but she is justified by Christ. Her place in history
is vindicated by the creed of the Son of man. She
loses her absurdity, her grotesqueness, her peculiar-
ity, when she stands on the steps of the only ladder
which professes to find a foothold for all sorts
and conditions of men. The idea which she has
ventilated has received a part to play in Christ's
message of reconciliation.
And the next place is one for Buddhism. After
redemption from the past comes Surrender to human
brotherhood. Christ, in the system of St Paul,
is not an individual ; he is the Head of a body—
the body of humanity. To surrender myself to
Christ, therefore, is to do exactly what the Buddhist
does—to yield myself to the service of man. The
difference is one not of act but of spirit. It mainly
lies in the fact that the Buddhist begins his sacri-
fice while the past is still pressing on him ; the
Christianity and the Messages of the Past. 335
Christian waits till the burden has been removed.
The effect of this is the difference between a
sacrifice of despair and a sacrifice of hope. Bud-
dhism, as it appears in Christianity, is not a differ-
ent star, but the old star in a new position. It
shines with the same brightness, but it shines
from an opposite locality. It was once lit by
grief; it is now illuminated by joy. It was once
fired by despondency; it is now inspired by hope.
It is no longer prompted by the belief that life
is not worth living, and that the essence of exis-
tence is pain. It arises rather from the conscious-
ness that life has revealed undreamt-of possibilities
of expansion, and from a conviction that the most
seemingly hopeless Soul may yet be partaker of
unclouded joy. The Buddhism of Christianity is
impelled to the Cross by the crown.
And, the result of this surrender is the reappear-
ance on the Christian ladder of that faith which it
superseded—Judaism. “IOve is the fulfilling of the
law,” are the words in which Christianity itself pro-
claims the possibility that, in a new Order of things,
Moses may live again. Judaism failed to keep a
perfect morality, because the keeping of a perfect
IIlorality was its aim ; the obstruction of golf con.
sciousness was created by the thought of self-
righteousness. But the religion of Christ declares
that, if love came first, there would be no fear of
failure. It declares that, if a man, instead of seek-
336 Messages of the Old Religions,
ing his own perfection, could begin by fixing his
affections on a perfect ideal, he would be borne into
law through love. The message of Judaism was the
power of the internal—the proclamation that all
strength came from within. But Judaism herself
never got far enough in to have much power. It
did not reach the centre—the heart. Christianity
found the mine for which Judaism was seeking. It
touched the most Subterranean spring in human
nature, and unsealed the deepest well from which
the waters of the life can flow—the impulse of the
affections. It made the yoke of morality easy and
its burden light. It enabled men to leap at a bound
over paths which hitherto had taxed their utmost
energy. It outran the commandments contained in
ordinances; it went beyond the letter; it did more
than was expected of it; it left Moses in the rear.
The law of Christ goes further than the law of Sinai,
and secures more success in its observance. Sinai
forbids to hurt ; but Calvary commands to heal.
Sinai forbids to impose a yoke; Calvary Commands
to bear a burden. Sinai forbids to pass the beggar
on the highway; Calvary commands to Seek as well
as save. The law of Moses has received in Christ
more than it lost in Judaism ; it has found in Him
its “times for the restitution of all things.”
And, in proportion as the moral law increases in
the power of its observance, will a place be found in
the Christian Pantheon for the ideas of Greece and
Christianity and the Messages of the Past. 337
Rome. We defined the position of Greece to be the
reverence for the present as distinguished from either
the past or the future. Such a state of things can-
not exist now ; but religion is at one with Science in
hoping for a time when it shall exist. Christianity
and modern Science profess to differ in many things,
but they are agreed in the anticipation of a golden
age for man, an age in which the present order of
things shall be perfected and glorified. To this time
of completed evolution the message of Greece may
look forward for its fulfilment. Alike from the
scientific and from the Christian stand-point, we
may contemplate the coming of a day when the
earth itself shall be worthy of reverence, when the
passing hour shall be worth preserving, and the
present shall be valued for itself alone. What does
Paul mean when he says, “The creation itself shall
be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the
glorious liberty of the sons of God” 2 Is it not
simply a prediction that the time is coming in which
the aspirations of Greece shall be fulfilled, when
poetry shall speak the language of prose, and beauty
shall become itself a teacher of truth 2 The Roman
too has his place in this vision of the glorious liberty
of the Sons of God. I have shown, in a previous
chapter, how the Roman ideal of a son of God was
itself but a premature and abortive effort to realise
a Christian conception. It was the search for a
kingdom which should embrace under its sway all
y
338 Messages of the Old Religions.
other kingdoms, which, without destroying diversities
of nature, should keep the unity of law. We have
seen how the ideal of Rome was above her power.
Her power was only physical, and therefore it could
not rule without crushing. But, as I have already
pointed out, Christianity offers to the old Roman
religion a realisation of its dream. It tells of a
dominion which she extends from sea to sea without
destroying the sea—without obliterating the boun-
daries that now divide, or annihilating the diversi-
ties that now distinguish. It shows us this king-
dom already existing in miniature, already growing
in strength, already prophetic of its future fulness;
and, by the very presentation of the vision, it con-
nects the modern with the ancient world, and joins
the culture of the later age with the civilisation of
an age that has passed away.
Nor has the message of the Teuton been omitted
in this accumulation of thought which has gathered
round the religion of the Cross. It will be remem-
bered that we defined this message to be the associa-
tion of development with the idea of divinity. I
indicated that the novelty lay in the association.
Progress was not a new idea as applied to the affairs
of men. But in the mythology of the Teuton the
scene of the progressive drama is laid not in earth
but heaven, and the growth through the successive
stages is a growth among the gods. Here is a thought
sufficiently bold to challenge our attention, and speci-
Christianity and the Messages of the Past. 339
ally striking among a people whose earliest reverence
was for the idea of complete and instantaneous power.
To say that the Divine Life can itself partake in the
changes of the universe, to admit that the Absolute
Spirit can be affected by the transmutations of exis-
tence, is a less natural thought than in modern times
it seems. Brahmanism appears to hold it; but it is
only in appearance. The universe of the Brahmin is
an illusion; there is no real movement either of the
human or of the divine, and nothing reigns but ever-
lasting stillness. But with the Teuton it is all the
reverse: the world is a reality; the external world is
a special reality. The acts of the gods are no parts
of a sleeping consciousness; the changes in the life of
the gods are no interludes of a dream. The drama
in heaven is a real drama; the progress is a genuine
progress. The growth of the Divine Life is distinc-
tively the message of the Teuton.
But, unique as it is among the religions of the
world, it is vindicated in that faith which professes
to find a place for all. In Christianity, as in the
mythology of the Teuton, we meet the same other-
wise anomalous doctrine that the Divine Life can
grow. Here the kingdom of heaven is compared not
to Something which is fashioned and finished from
the beginning, but to a seed which is cast into the
ground, which is at first the least of all seeds, which
is long hid from the view of the beholder, which lies
for days and nights unnoticed, and which, at last,
340 Messages of the Old Religions.
springs up, he cannot tell how. Paul declares in the
boldest language that there is a “law of the Spirit of
Tife.” He means that the Spirit of Life has made
itself subject to the progress of humanity, has flowed
with man's growth and ebbed with man's arrested
development. He tells us that the Christian life—
the life of the Eternal—is itself a process of incarna-
tion, by which the stages of humanity are conquered
one by One, a process by which the infant becomes a
child, the child a youth, and the youth a full-grown
man. We see the life born amid trouble, hid in
obscurity, reared in subjection, tried by temptation,
matured by suffering, ripened by crucifixion, and only
reaching its perfect beauty at the end of the days.
We see first the blade, then the ear, afterward the
full corn in the ear. Yet we are taught to think of
the process as divine from the very beginning—divine
in its germ, divine in its struggle, divine in its con-
summation. The message of the Teuton has been re-
delivered by the Spirit of Christ; it has received its
justification from the religion of humanity.
I have thus endeavoured to show that the appear-
ance of Christianity has been accompanied by a
resurrection from the dead. It is popularly said to
have conquered the faiths of the past. And so it
has; but in a very peculiar way. It has conquered
as the Roman empire wished to conquer—not by
submergence, but by incorporation. It would not
be true to say that it has destroyed them ; it would
Christianity and the Messages of the Past. 341
be more correct to affirm that it has kept them alive.
They had all outgrown their youth, all survived
their time, all failed to bring rest to the soul. The
form remained ; the sensuous life remained; but the
spirit had passed away. If Christianity had not
appeared, paradoxical as it may seem, I think these
religions would have become supremely uninterest-
ing; Christianity has made them vivid by making
them living. In its many-sidedness it has a side
for each of these. It has let in its light upon them ;
it has given its breath to them; it has found a place
for them in its own system. It has given them a
logical order which has dispelled the contradictions
of the natural order. Indian and Greek, Roman
and Teuton, Buddhist and Parsee, Egyptian and
Chinaman, can meet here hand in hand; because in
the comprehensive temple of Christian truth there is
not only a niche which each may fill, but a niche
which, at Some stage of its development, must be
filled by one and all.
Therefore it is that the religion of Christ ought
to have peculiar interest in the faiths of the past.
They are not, to her, dead faiths; they are not even
modernised. They are preserved inviolable as parts
of herself more inviolable than fibey would have
been if she had never come. Christianity has
claimed to be “the manifold wisdom of God.” In
this ascription she has been candid to the past.
She has not denied its wisdom; she has only aspired
342 Messages of the Old Religions.
to enfold it. She has not sought to derogate from
the doctrines of antiquity; she has only sought to
diminish their antagonisms. China may keep her
materialism, and India may retain her mysticism;
Rome may grasp her strength, and Greece may
nurse her beauty; Persia may tell of the opposition
to God’s power, and Egypt may sing of His pre-
eminence even amid the tombs: but for each and all
there is a seat in the Christian Pantheon, and a
justification in the light of the manifold wisdom of
God.
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