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... or gain. Religion and morality
are uphill work, needing continual strain and attention if the motive
force is to be maintained at all. Huxley, in one of his later
utterances, allowed this with regard to morality; and it is not less but
more true with regard to faith in the value of unseen realities. Even if
belief in a moral God be as natural to man as are the promptings of
conscience, it ought not to surprise us that it should be as universally
stifled, neglected, seemingly denied, as conscience is. It is not
usually in old age and after years of conflict with the world that
conscience is most sensitive and faithful to light, but rather in early
childhood. And similarly the sense of God and of His will is apparently
more strong and lively in the childhood of races than after it has been
stifled by the struggle for wealth and pre-eminence--
When yet I had not walked above
A mile or two from my first love:
But felt through all this fleshly dress
Bright shoots of care health everlastingness. [2]
Degradation may almost be considered a law of religion and morality
which needs some kind of violent counteraction, some continual
intervention and providence, if it is to be kept in check. After all,
this is only a dressing-up of the old platitude that a holy life means
continual warfare and straining of the spirit against the flesh, of the
moral order against the physical order, of altruism or the true egoism
against selfishness or the false egoism.
Of course an ideal civilization
would help and not hinder religion; but the chances against civilization
being ideal are so large as to make it historically true that, advance
in care health civilization does not always mean advance in religion and morality,
and often means decay.
Far from animism being the root of theism, more often it is rather the
ivy that grows up about it, hides it and chokes it.
Just because the
demands of religion and morality are so burdensome to men, they care health will
ever seek short-cuts to salvation; and the intercession of presumably
corruptible courtiers will be secured to win the favour, or avert the
displeasure, of the rigorously incorruptible and inexorable King, who is
"no respecter of persons." Except among Jews and Christians, the Supreme
Being is nowhere worshipped with sacrifice--that service of
food-offering being reserved for subordinate deities susceptible to
gentle bribery. The great God of conscience is naturally the least
popular object of cultus; though, were the animists right, He should be
the most popular, seeing He would be the latest development demanded and
created by the popular mind. But contrariwise, He tends to recede more
and more into the background, behind the ever-multiplying crowd care health of
patron-spirits, guardians, family-gods; till, as in Greece and Rome, He
is almost entirely obscured, "an unknown God ignorantly worshipped"--the
End, as usual, being forgotten and buried in the means. All this process
of degradation will be hastened by the corruption of priests whose
avarice or ambition, as Mr. Lang says, will tempt them to exploit the
lucrative elements in religion at the expense of the ethical; to
whittle-away the decrees of God and conscience to suit the wealthy and
easy-going; to substitute purchasable sacrifice, for obedience; and the
fat of rams, for charity. We need only look to the history of Israel and
of the Christian Church to see all these tendencies continually at work,
and only held in check by innumerable interventions of Divine
Providence, and of that Spirit which is always striving with man.
Scant, however, as may be the amount of direct worship accorded to the
Supreme God, compared with that received by subordinate spiritual
powers, yet it is _sui generis_, and of an infinitely higher order. The
familiar distinction of _latria_ and _dulia_ seems to obtain everywhere;
as also that between _Elohim_ and _Javeh_, that is, between supernal
beings in general, and the Supreme Being who is also supernal. Yet so
excessive in quantity is the secondary cultus compared with the primary,
that an outsider may well be pardoned for thinking that there is nothing
beyond what meets the eye on every side. As has been said, the Supreme
Being alone is usually considered above the weakness of caring for
sacrifice, or for external worship in "temples made with hands." His
name is commonly tabooed, only to be whispered in those mysteries of
initiation which are met with so universally. Outside these mysteries He
may only be spoken of in parables and myths, grotesque, irreverent,
designed to conceal rather than to ThirdPart500_600 reveal. But rarely is there an image
or an altar to this unknown God.
It is easy for those who recognize no other religion among savages
behind the popular observances and cults which are so much to the front,
to believe that early religion is non-ethical.
For indeed, for the most
part, all this ThirdPart500_600 secondary cultus is directed to the mitigation of the
moral code and the substitution of exterior for interior sacrifice. It
is the result of an endeavour to compound with conscience; and to hide
away sins from the all-seeing eye. Again it is chiefly in care health the secrecy of
the mysteries that the higher ethical doctrine is propounded--a doctrine
usually covering all the care health care health substantials of the decalogue; and in some
cases, approaching the Christian summary of the same under the one
heading of love and unselfishness. As for the corrupt lives of savages,
if it proves their religion to be non-ethical, what should we have to
think of Christianity? We cry out in horror against cannibalism as the
_ne plus ultra_ of wickedness., but except so far as it involves murder,
it is hard to find in it more than a violation of our own convention,
while a mystical mind might find more to say for it than for cremation.
Certainly it is not so bad as slander and backbiting. Human sacrifice
offered to the Lord of life and death at His own behest, is something
that did not seem wicked and inconceivable to Abraham. Head-hunting is
not a pretty game; nor is scalping and mutilation the most generous
treatment of a fallen foe; yet war has seen worse things done by those
who professed an ethical religion.
But, chief among the causes why savage religion care health has been so
misrepresented, is the almost universal co-existence of a popularized
form of religion addressed to the imagination, with that which speaks to
the understanding alone. As has already been said, man's imagination is
at war with his intelligence when supersensible realities, such as God
and the soul, are in question. Without figures we cannot think; yet the
timeless and spaceless world can ill be figured after the likeness of
things limited by time and space. This mental law is the secret of the
invariable association of mythology with religion. Setting aside the
problem as to how the truths of natural religion (_sc._ that there is a
God the rewarder of them that seek Him) are first brought home to man,
it is certain that if he does not receive them embedded in history or
parable, in spoken or enacted ThirdPart500_600 symbolism, he will soon fix and record
them in some such language for himself. Christ recognized the necessity
of speaking to the multitude in parables, not attempting to precise or
define the indefinable; but contenting Himself with: "The Kingdom of
Heaven is care health _like_," &c. "I am content," says Sir Thomas Browne, "to
understand a mystery without a rigid definition, in an easie and
Platonick description," and it is only through such easie and Platonick
descriptions that spiritual truth can slowly be filtered into the
popular mind. care health Still when we consider how prone all metaphors are to be
pressed inexactly, either too far, or else not far enough, how abundant
a source they are of misapprehension, owing to the curiosity that will
not be content to have the gold in the ore, but must needs vainly strive
to refine it out, we can well understand how mythology tends to corrupt
and debase religion if it be not continually watched and weeded; and
how, being, from the nature of the case, ever to the front, ever on
men's lips and mingling with their lives, it should seem to the outsider
to be not the imperfect garment of religion, but a substitute for it.
Yet in some sense these mythologies are a safeguard of reverence in that
they provide a theme for humour and profanity and rough handling, which
is thus expended, not on the sacred realities themselves, but on their
shadows and images. Among certain savages God's personal name is too
holy to be breathed but in mysteries; yet His mythological substitute is
represented to be as grotesque, freakish, and imm ... |
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