Part 29 (1/2)

It mast be repeated that on this theory an explanation is given of what the old Degeneration hypothesis does not explain. Granting a primal religion relatively pure in its beginnings, why did it degenerate?

Mr. Max Mullet, looking on religion as the development of the sentiment of the Infinite, regards fetis.h.i.+sm as a secondary and comparatively late form of belief. We find it, he observes, in various forms of Christianity; Christianity, therefore, is primary there, relic wors.h.i.+p is secondary.

Religion beginning, according to him, in the sense of the infinite, as awakened in man by tall trees, high hills, and so on, it advances to the infinite of s.p.a.ce and sky, and so to the infinitely divine. This is primary: fetis.h.i.+sm is secondary. Arguing elsewhere against this idea, I have asked: What was the _modus_ of degeneration which produced similar results in Christianity, and in African and other religions? How did it work? I am not aware that Mr. Max Muller has answered this question.

But how degeneration worked--namely, by Animism supplanting Theism--is conspicuously plain on our theory.

Take the early chapters of Genesis, or any savage cosmogonic myth you please. Deathless man is face to face with the Creator. He cannot degenerate in religion. He cannot offer sacrifice, for the Creator obviously needs nothing, and again, as there is no death, he cannot slay animals for the Creator. But, in one way or another, usually by breach of a taboo, Death enters the world. Then comes, by process of evolution, belief in hungry spirits, belief in spirits who may inhabit stones or sticks; again there arise priests who know how to propitiate spirits and how to tempt them into sticks and stones. These arts become lucrative and are backed by the cleverest men, and by the apparent evidence of prophecies by convulsionaries. Thus every known kind of degeneration in religion is inevitably introduced as a result of the theory of Animism. We do not need an hypothesis of Original Sin as a cause of degeneration, and, if Mr. Max Muller's doctrine of the Infinite were _viable_, we have supplied, in Animism, under advancing social conditions, what he does not seem to provide, a cause and _modus_ of degeneration. Fetis.h.i.+sm would thus be really 'secondary,' _ex hypothesi_, but as we nowhere find Fetis.h.i.+sm alone, without the other elements of religion, we cannot say, historically, whether it is secondary or not. Fetis.h.i.+sm logically needs, in some of its aspects, the doctrine of spirits, and Theism, in what we take to be its earliest known form, does not logically need the doctrine of spirits as given matter. So far we can go, but not farther, as to the fact of priority in evolution. Nevertheless we meet, among the most backward peoples known to us, among men just emerged from the palaeolithic stage of culture, men who are involved in dread of ghosts, a religious Idea which certainly is not born of ghost-wors.h.i.+p, for by these men, ancestral ghosts are not wors.h.i.+pped.

In their hearts, on their lips, in their moral training we find (however blended with barbarous absurdities, and obscured by rites of another origin) the faith in a Being who created or constructed the world; who was from time beyond memory or conjecture; who is primal, who makes for righteousness, and who loves mankind. This Being has not the notes of degeneration; his home is 'among the stars,' not in a hill or in a house.

To him no altar smokes, and for him no blood is shed.

'G.o.d, that made the world and all things therein, seeing that He is lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; neither is wors.h.i.+pped with men's hands, as though He needed any thing ... and hath made of one blood all nations of men ... that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after Him, and find Him, though He be not far from every one of us: for in Him we live, and move, and have our being.'

That the words of St. Paul are literally true, as to the feeling after a G.o.d who needs not anything at man's hands, the study of anthropology seems to us to demonstrate. That in this G.o.d 'we have our being,' in so far as somewhat of ours may escape, at moments, from the bonds of Time and the manacles of s.p.a.ce, the earlier part of this treatise is intended to suggest, as a thing by no means necessarily beyond a reasonable man's power to conceive. That these two beliefs, however attained (a point on which we possess no positive evidence), have commonly been subject to degeneration in the religions of the world, is only too obvious.

So far, then, the nature of things and of the reasoning faculty does not seem to give the lie to the old Degeneration theory.

To these conclusions, as far as they are matters of scientific opinion, we have been led by nothing but the study of anthropology.

[Footnote 1: _Myths of the New World_, p. 44.]

[Footnote 2: _Prim. Cult_. i. 35.]

[Footnote 3: _Introduction_, p. 199; also p. 161.]

[Footnote 4: _Prim. Cult_. ii. 360,361.]

[Footnote 5: Prof. Menzies, _History of Religion_, p. 23.]

[Footnote 6: [Greek: legomenai theion anagchai.] Porphyry.]

[Footnote 7: Ixtlilochitl. Balboa, _Hist. du Perou_, p. 62.]

[Footnote 8: Robertson Smith, _Religion of the Semites_, pp. 104, 105.]

[Footnote 9: Op. cit. p. 106.]

[Footnote 10: On the Glenelg some caves and mountain tops are haunted or holy. Waitz, vi. 804, No authority cited.]

[Footnote 11: _Religion of Semites_, p. 110.]

[Footnote 12: _Rel. Sem_. p. 71.]

[Footnote 13: Howitt, _J.A.T_. 1884, p. 187.]

[Footnote 14: Op. cit. p. 188.]

[Footnote 15: _Rel. Sem_. p. 207.]

[Footnote 16: _Rel. Sem_. p. 225.]