Part 1 (2/2)
We start then with the a.s.sumption that religion is a thing which has developed from the first, as law has, or as art has; and the best method we can follow, if it should prove practicable, will be to follow its movement from the beginning. We must not presume to hope that everything will be made clear, or that we shall meet with no religious phenomena to which we cannot a.s.sign their place in the development. We must remember that ground is often lost as well as won in human history, and that in religions as in nations degeneration frequently occurs as well as progress. We must not be too sure that we shall be able to find any plain path leading through the immeasurable forests of man's religious sentiments and practices.
Yet we may at least expect to find evidence of the direction which on the whole the growth of religion has followed.
Preliminary Definition of Religion.--But, before we can set out on this inquiry, we are met by the question, What is it that we suppose to have been thus developed? In order to trace any process of evolution it is necessary to define that which is evolved; for it belongs to the very idea of evolution that the ident.i.ty of the subject of it is not changed on the way up, but that the germ and the finished product are the same ent.i.ty, only differing from each other in that the one has still to grow while the other is grown. Futile were it indeed to sketch a history of religion with the savage at one end of it and the Christian thinker at the other, if it could be said that in no point did the religion of the savage and that of the Christian coincide, but that the product was a thing of entirely different nature from the germ. It seems necessary, therefore, in the first place, to say what that is, of which we are to attempt the history; or in other words, to say what we mean by religion.
It must not be forgotten that an adequate definition of a thing which is growing can only be reached when the growth is complete. During its growth it is showing what it is, and its higher as well as its lower manifestations are part of its nature. The world has not yet found out completely, but is still in the course of finding out, what religion is. Any definition propounded at this stage must, therefore, be of an elementary and provisional character. I propose then as a working definition of religion in the meantime, that it is ”The wors.h.i.+p of higher powers.” This appears at first sight a very meagre account of the matter; but if we consider what it implies, we shall find it is not so meagre. In the first place it involves an element of belief. No one will wors.h.i.+p higher powers unless he believes that such powers exist. This is the intellectual factor. Not that the intellectual is distinguished in early forms of religion from the other factors, any more than grammar is distinguished by early man as an element of language. But something intellectual, some creed, is present implicitly even in the earliest wors.h.i.+ps. Should there be no belief in higher powers, true wors.h.i.+p cannot continue. If it be continued in outward act, it has lost reality to the mind of the wors.h.i.+pper, and the result is an apparent or a sham religion, a wors.h.i.+p devoid of one of the essential conditions of religion. This is true at every stage. But in the second place, these powers which are wors.h.i.+pped are ”higher.” Religion has respect, not to beings men regard as on a level with themselves or even beneath themselves, but to beings in some way above and beyond themselves, and whom they are disposed to approach with reverence. When objects appear to be wors.h.i.+pped for which the wors.h.i.+pper feels contempt, and which a moment afterwards he will maltreat or throw away, there also one of the essential conditions is absent, and such wors.h.i.+p must be judged to fall short of religion. There may no doubt be some religion in it; the object he wors.h.i.+ps may appear to the savage, in whose mind there is little continuity, at one moment to be higher than himself and the next moment to be lower; but the result of the whole is something less than religion. And in the third place these higher powers are wors.h.i.+pped. That is to say, religion is not only belief in the higher powers but it is a cultivating of relations with them, it is a practical activity continuously directed to these beings. It is not only a thinking but also a doing; this also is essential to it. When wors.h.i.+p is discontinued, religion ceases; a principle indeed not to be applied too narrowly, since the apparent cessation of wors.h.i.+p may be merely its transition to another, possibly a higher form; but religion is not present unless there be not only a belief in higher powers but an effort of one kind or another to keep on good terms with them.
Criticism of other Definitions.--What has now been said will enable us to judge of several of the definitions of religion which have been put before the world in recent years. Without going back to the definitions offered by philosophers who wrote before the scientific study of our subject had begun, and limiting ourselves to those which have been propounded in the interests of our science, we notice that several make religion consist in an intellectual activity.[2] Thus Mr. Max Muller[3] says that ”Religion is a mental faculty or disposition which independent of, nay, in spite of, sense and reason, enables man to apprehend the Infinite under different names, and under varying disguises. Without that faculty ... no religion would be possible.” To this definition there are various strong objections.
It implies that there is only one way in which men come to believe in higher beings; they arrive at that belief by finding something which transcends them and which they cannot understand; _i.e._ by an intellectual process. It may be doubted whether the sense of disappointment with the finite is the only road, or even a common road, to belief in G.o.ds. Mr. Muller's omission, moreover, from his definition, of the practical side of religion, of the element of wors.h.i.+p, is a fatal objection to it. Belief and wors.h.i.+p are inseparable sides of religion, which does not come fully into existence till both are present. In a later work[4] Mr. Muller admits the force of this objection, urged by several scholars, to his definition, and modifies it as follows: ”Religion consists in the perception of the infinite under such manifestations as are able to influence the moral character of man.” In this form the definition recognises that wors.h.i.+p, the practical activity in which man's moral character shows itself in fear, grat.i.tude, love, contrition, is an essential part of religion, and that perceptions of the infinite apart from this are only one side of it. His original definition, however, has played too large a part in the history of our subject to be left without careful notice. The same objection applies to Mr.
Herbert Spencer's account of the matter. Mr. Spencer finds the basis of all religion in the inscrutableness of the Power which the universe manifests to us. The belief common to all religions, he holds, is the presence of something which pa.s.ses comprehension. The idea of the absolute and unconditioned he regards as accompanying all our consciousness of things conditioned and limited, and as being not a negative notion, not merely the denial of limits, but a positive one. The unconditioned is that of which all our thoughts and ideas are manifestations, but which we never can know, with regard to which we cannot affirm anything but that it exists. This definition like that last noticed traces religion to the defects in man's knowledge, and rather to a negative than a positive element in his experience.
It also comes under the objection that it traces religion rather to an intellectual than a practical motive, and omits the element of wors.h.i.+p.
[Footnote 2: Though Mr. Tylor defines religion as the ”belief in spiritual beings,” he is not to be charged with making it too much a matter of the intellect. He uses the word belief in a wide sense as including the practices it involves. In the word ”spiritual,”
however, Mr. Tylor brings into the definition his theory of Animism, and thus makes it unserviceable for those who do not adopt that theory.]
[Footnote 3: _Introduction to the Science of Religion_, 1882, p. 13.
The definition was put forward in the year 1873, and in his lectures on the Origin of Religion, 1882, Mr. Muller adhered to it as being in the main sound (p. 23).]
[Footnote 4: _Natural Religion_, 1888, pp. 188, 193.]
Other scholars have explained religion as the action of the curiosity of the human mind, of that impulse which prompts man to investigate the causes of things, and specially to seek for the first cause of all things. Here we touch what is certainly to be recognised as an invariable feature of religion; it always professes to explain the world, and to bring unity to man's mind by clearing up the problems which perplex him, and affording him a commanding point of view, from which he may see all the parts of the world and of life fall into their places. This, however, does not tell us what religion itself is. This curiosity, this impulse to know, are not specifically religious; they belong rather to philosophy. Other motives than those connected with knowledge entered from the first into man's wors.h.i.+p.
Curiosity impelled him to seek the first cause of things; in religion he saw something that promised to explain the world to him, and to explain him to himself. But it was something more than curiosity that made him regard that cause, when found, as a G.o.d, and pay it reverence and sacrifice. What is the motive of wors.h.i.+p? Wonder, no doubt, is always present in it, but what is there in it beyond wonder? No definition of religion can be regarded as complete in which the motive of wors.h.i.+p is left undetermined. That is of the essence of the matter. There must be a moral as well as an intellectual quality which is characteristic of religion. What is religion morally? Acts of wors.h.i.+p may be specified in which every conceivable moral quality seeks to express itself. The most contradictory motives, pride and anger and revenge, as well as fear or hunger or contrition, enter into such acts. But if religion is a matter of sentiment as well as of outward posture, these acts of wors.h.i.+p cannot all be equally ent.i.tled to the name, and something is wanted to complete our definition.
Fuller Definition.--Let us add what seems to be wanting; and say that religion is the ”wors.h.i.+p of higher powers from a sense of need”! This will remind the reader of Schleiermacher's definition--”a sense of infinite dependence.” It was always objected to that definition, that it made religion no more than a sentiment, a mood, but that besides this, it is both belief and action. But the truth Schleiermacher urged was one of essential importance to the matter. Belief in G.o.ds and acts of wors.h.i.+p paid to them do not const.i.tute religion unless the sentiment, the sense of need, be also there. These three together, feeling, belief, and will expressing itself in action, const.i.tute religion both in the lowest and in the highest levels of civilisation.
A belief must exist, to take a step farther, that the being wors.h.i.+pped is capable of supplying what the wors.h.i.+pper requires. Men do not pray nor bring offerings to beings they suppose to be incapable of attending to them, or powerless to do them any good or evil. It is implied in every act of wors.h.i.+p that the being addressed is a power who is able to do for the wors.h.i.+pper what he cannot do for himself. It is his inability to help himself or to supply his own needs that sends the wors.h.i.+pper to his G.o.d, who has a power he himself has not. If he could help himself he would not need religion, if his life were either perfectly prosperous and even, so that there was nothing left to wish for, or perfectly miserable and unsuccessful, so that there was no room for hope, he would not resort to higher powers; but neither of these two being the case, his life on the contrary being a mixed lot of good and evil, in which there are blessings his own forces cannot secure, and dangers from which no efforts of his own can save him, and the belief having arisen within him, in what way we need not now inquire, that higher powers exist who can, if they will, defend and prosper him, in this way he has religion, he keeps up intercourse with higher powers. And thus religion is not necessarily, even in its most primitive form, a manifestation of mere selfishness. Though gifts are offered which are expected to please the higher beings, and though benefits are asked of which the wors.h.i.+pper is urgently in need, such transactions are not necessarily sordid any more than similar applications between human beings, between two friends, or between a parent and a child.
Even the savage living in entire isolation, at war with every one and conscious of no needs but those of food and shelter, will not seek benefits from his G.o.d without some feeling of attachment, nor without some sense of strengthened friends.h.i.+p should the benefit be granted him. When once this sense of friends.h.i.+p has arisen, religion is present, the man has come to be in living relation with a higher power, whom he conceives, no doubt, after his own likeness, but nevertheless as greater than he is.
This then is what we conceive to be the essence of religion--the wors.h.i.+p of higher powers, from a sense of need; and it is of this that we are to trace the history though only in the barest outlines.
The definition itself suggests in what way the development may be expected to work itself out. According as the needs change their character, of which men are conscious, so will their religion also change. The gradual elevation and refinement of human needs, in the growth of civilisation, is the motive force of the development of religion. The deities themselves, their past history and their present character, the sacrifices offered to them, and the benefits aimed at in intercourse with them, all must grow up as man himself grows, from rudeness to refinement and from caprice to order. At its lowest, religion is perhaps an individual affair between the savage and his G.o.d, and has to do with material individual needs. At a higher stage (not always nor even commonly later in time) it is the affair of a family, of a tribe, or of a combination of tribes, and with each of these extensions the requests grow broader and less personal which have to be presented to the deity; the religion becomes a common wors.h.i.+p for public ends. The needs of the nomad are other than those of the settled agriculturist, and those of the countryman differ from those of the citizen, and those of the Laplander from those of the Negro, and these differences will be reflected in the aspect of the deities and in the observances celebrated in their honour. When art begins to stir within a nation, the G.o.ds have to adapt themselves to the new taste. As society grows more humane, cruel and sanguinary religious observances, though they may long keep a hold of the ignorant and excitable, lose their support in the public conscience and are sentenced to change or to extinction. And when a new consciousness of personal human dignity springs up, and men come to feel the infinite value and the infinite responsibility of personal life, the old public religion is felt to be cold and distant, and religious services of a more personal and more intimate kind are sought for.
Thus religion and civilisation advance together; according as the civilisation is in any people, so is its religion. It is vain, broadly speaking, to look for the combination of primitive manners and customs with a lofty spiritual faith. The converse it is true may often seem to take place. Religion, or rather religious creeds and practices, often seem to lag behind civilisation and to maintain themselves long after the reason and the conscience of a people has condemned them. That is because religion is what man values most in his life, and he is loath to change observances in which his affections are powerfully engaged. But religion must reflect the ideals of the society in which it exists; the needs which the society feels at the time must be the burden of its prayers; its sacrifices must be such as the general sentiment allows; its G.o.ds, to retain the allegiance of the community, must alter with time and prove themselves alive and in touch with their people. And if it be the case that civilisation has on the whole advanced upwards from the first; if, as Mr. Tylor a.s.sures us,[5] man began with his lowest and has, in spite of occasional declines, on the whole been improving ever since, then of religion also the same will be true. It also will be found to begin with its rudest forms and gradually to grow better.
Religion in fact is the inner side of civilisation, and expresses the essential spirit of human life in various ages and nations. The religion of a race is the truest expression of its character, and reflects most faithfully its att.i.tude and aims and policy. The religion of an age shows what at that time const.i.tuted the object of man's aspiration and endeavour, as older hopes grew pale and new hopes rose on his sight. Thus the study of the religions of the world is the study of the very soul of its history; it is the study of the desires and aspirations which throughout the course of history men have not been ashamed, nay, which they have been proud and determined to confess. No more fascinating study could possibly engage us. It is true that the requirements for the adequate treatment of the subject are such as few indeed can hope to possess. He who would treat the history of religion aright ought to know thoroughly the whole of the history of civilisation; he should have explored the vast domain of savage life and thought that has recently been opened up to us, and he should be at home in every century of every nation from the beginning of history. At a time like this, when new light is being poured every year on every part of our subject, no statement of it can be more than tentative and partial. The student will be directed at each step to sources of fuller information.
[Footnote 5: _Primitive Culture_, chap. ii.]
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