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A

COMPARATIVE

VIEW OF RELIGIONS.

Translated from the Dutch of J. H. Scholten,
PROFESSOR AT LEYDEN,

BY FRANCIS T. WASHBURN.

Reprinted by permission from “The Religious Magazine and Monthly Review.”

BOSTON:
CROSBY & DAMRELL, 100 WASHINGTON ST.
1870.

A
COMPARATIVE
VIEW OF RELIGIONS.

INTRODUCTION.[1]

The conception of religion presupposes, a, God as object;
b, man as subject; c, the mutual relation existing between
them. According to the various stages of development which
men have reached, religious belief manifests itself either in
the form of a passive feeling of dependence, where the subject,
not yet conscious of his independence, feels himself
wholly overmastered by the deity, or the object of worship,
as by a power outside of and opposed to himself; or, when
the feeling of independence has awakened, in a one-sided elevation
of the human, whereby man in worshiping a deity deifies
himself. In the highest stage of religious development,
the most entire feeling of dependence is united in religion
with the strongest consciousness of personal independence.
The first of these forms is exhibited in the fetich and nature-worship
of the ancient nations; the second in Buddhism,
and in the deification of the human, which reaches its full
height among the Greeks. The true religion, prepared in
Israel, is the Christian, in which man, grown conscious of his
oneness with God, is ruled by the divine as an inner power
of life, and acts spontaneously and freely while in the fullest
dependence upon God. Since Christ, no more perfect religion
has appeared. What is true and good in Islamism was
borrowed from Israel and Christianity.

Although it is probable that every nation passed through
different forms of religious belief before its religion reached
its highest development, yet the earlier periods lie in great
part beyond the reach of historical investigation. The history
of religion, therefore, has for its task the review of the
various forms of religion with which we are historically
acquainted, in the order of psychological development.

CHAPTER I.

FETICHISM. THE CHINESE. THE EGYPTIANS.

1. FETICHISM.

The lowest stage of religious development is fetichism, as
it is found among the savage tribes of the polar regions, and
in Africa, America, and Australia. In this stage, man’s
needs are as yet very limited and exclusively confined to the
material world. Still too little developed intellectually to
worship the divine in nature and her powers, he thinks he
sees the divinity which he seeks in every unknown object
which strikes his senses, or which his imagination calls up.
In this stage, religion has no higher character than that of
caprice and of love of the mysterious and marvelous, mixed
with fear and a slavish adoration of the divine. The worship
and the priest’s office (Shaman, Shamanism) consist here
chiefly in the use of charms, to exorcise a dreaded power.
From this savage fetichism the nature-worship found among
the Aztecs in Mexico, and the worship of the sun in Peru,
are distinguished by the greater definiteness and order of
their religious conceptions and usages. In them the gods
have names, and an ordained priesthood cares for the religious
interests of the people. The highest form to which
fetichism has attained is the worship of Manitou, the great
spirit, which is found among the ancient tribes of North
America.

2. THE CHINESE.

When man reaches a higher development, caprice and
chance disappear from religion. Having outgrown fetichism,
man begins, as is the case among the Chinese, to distinguish
in the world around him an active and a passive principle,
force and matter (Yang and Yn), heaven and earth (Kien and
Kouen). We have here nature-worship in its beginnings.
In this stage, even less than in fetichism, is there a definite
idea of God, much less a conception of him as personal and
spiritual lord. The Chinese, from the practical, empirical
point of view peculiar to him, recognizes the spiritual only in
man and chiefly in the state. His religion, therefore, is confined
exclusively to the faithful keeping of the laws of the
state (the Celestial Kingdom), in which he sees the reflection
of heaven, to the recognition of the Emperor as the son and
representative of heaven, and to the worship of the forefathers,
especially of the great men and departed emperors,
to whose memory the Chinese temples, or pagodas, are dedicated.
The origin of this religion dates, according to the
tradition, from Fo-hi (2950 B.C.), the founder of the Chinese
state. In the fifth century before Christ, Kong-tse, or Kong-fu-tse
(Confucius), appeared as a reformer of the religion of
his countrymen, and gathered the ancient records and traditions
of his people into a sacred literature, which is known
by the name of the “King” (the books), “Yo-King” (the
book of nature), “Chu-King” (the book of history), “Chi-King”
(the book of songs). The contents of the “King”
became later with the Chinese sages Meng-tse (360 B.C.)
and Tschu-tsche (1200 A.D.) an object of philosophical
speculation. The doctrine of Lao-tse, the younger contemporary
of Kong-tse, which lays down as the basis of the
world, that is of the unreal or non-existent, a supreme principle,
Tao, or Being, corresponds with the Brahma doctrine of
the Indians, among whom he lived for a long time; but this
doctrine never became popular in China.

3. THE EGYPTIANS.

The worship of nature, which is seen in its beginnings
among the Chinese, exhibits itself among the Egyptians in a
more developed form as theogony. Here also the reflecting
mind rose to the recognition of two fundamental principles,
the producing and the passive power of nature, Kneph and
Neith, from which sprang successively the remaining powers
of nature, time, air, earth, light and darkness, personified by
the fantasy of the people into as many divinities. The Egyptian
mythology also (none has as yet been discovered among
the Chinese) exhibits a like character. Fruitfulness and
drought, the results of the Nile’s overflowing and receding,
are imaged in the myth of Osiris, Isis, and Typhon. The
visible form under which the divine was worshiped in Egypt
was the sacred animal, the bull Apis, dedicated to Osiris, the
cow, dedicated to Isis, as symbols of agriculture; the bird
Ibis, the crocodile, the dog Anubis, and other animals, whose
physical characteristics impressed the as yet childish man,
who saw in them the symbol, either of the beneficent power
of nature which moved him to thankfulness, or of a destructive
power which he dreaded and whose anger he sought to
avert. The religion of Egypt was not of a purely spiritual
character. To the man whose eye is not yet open to the
manifestation of the spiritual around him and in him, the
divine is not spirit, but as yet only nature. The animal,
although in the form of the sphinx approaching the human,
holds in Egyptian art a place above the human as symbol of
the divine.

CHAPTER II.

THE ARIAN NATIONS.

1. THE EAST ARIANS. THE INDIANS.

In the development of religion among the Indians, the following
periods may be distinguished:—

a. The original Veda-religion.

The original religion of Arya originated in Bactria. From
thence, before the time of Zoroaster, it was brought over,
with the great migration of the people, to the land of the
seven rivers, which they conquered, and which stretched from
the Indus to the Hesidrus. It consisted, according to the
oldest literature of the Veda, in a polytheistical worship of
the divine, either as the beneficent or the baneful power of
nature. The clear, blue sky, the light of the sun, the rosy
dawn, the storm that spends itself in fruitful rain, the winds
and gales which drive away the clouds, the rivers whose fruitful
slime overspreads the fields,—these moved the inhabitants
of India to the worship of the divine as the beneficent
power of nature which blesses man. On the other hand, he
changed under the impression of the harmful phenomena of
nature, the dark and close-packed clouds which hold back the
rain and intercept the sunshine, the parching heat of summer,
which dries up the rivers and hinders growth and fruitfulness,
and these also he erected into objects of awe and religious
adoration. From this view of nature sprang the Indian mythology.
The oldest divinity (Deva) of the Indians is Varuna,
the all-embracing heaven, who marks out their courses for the
heavenly luminaries, who rules the day and the night, who is
lord of life and death, whose protection is invoked, whose
anger deprecated. After him, the great ruler of nature, there
appear, in the Veda hymns, Indra, the blue sky, god of light
and thunder, the warrior who in battle stands beside the combatants;
Vayu, the god of the wind, the chief of the Maruts,
or the winds; Rudra, the god of the hurricane; Vritra, the
hostile god of the clouds; Ahi, the parching heat of summer.
In the mythology of the people, Indra, god of light, aided by
Vayu and Rudra, wages war with Vritra,—who, as god of
the clouds, holds back the rain and the light,—and appears
as opponent of the destructive Ahi. The other divinities also
which appear in the Vedas are personified powers of nature,—the
twin brothers Aswins (equites), or the first rays of the sun,
Ushas the maiden, or the rosy dawn, Surya, Savitri, the god of
the sun. Great significance is given in the Indian mythology
to Agni, the god of fire, who burns the sacrifice in honor of
the gods, who conveys the offerings and prayers of men to
gods and their gifts to men, who gladdens the domestic
hearth, lights up the darkness of night, drives away the evil
spirits, the Ashuras and Rakshas, and purges of evil the souls
of men. Religion, still wholly patriarchal in form, and free
from hierarchical constraint and from the later dogmatic narrowness,
bore in this earlier stage of its development the
character of the still free and warlike life of a nomadic people
living in the midst of a sublime nature, where everything, the
clear sky, sunshine, and boisterous storm, mountains and rivers,
disposed to worship. As yet the Indian knew no close
priestly caste. Worship consisted in prayers and offerings,
especially in the Soma-offering, which was offered as food to
the gods. No fear of future torment after death as yet embittered
the enjoyment of life and made dying fearful. Yama
was the friendly guide of the souls of heroes to the heaven of
Indra or Varuna, and not yet the inexorable prince of hell
who tormented the souls of the ungodly in the kingdom of the
dead. Of later barbarous usages also, such as the widow’s
sacrificing herself on the funeral pile of her departed husband,
there was as yet no trace; and in the heroic poetry, as yet
not disfigured by later Brahminical alterations and additions,
the heroes Krishna and Rama appear as types of courage and
self-sacrifice, and not, as later, as avatars, or human incarnations,
of the deity.

b. Brahminism.

When the nomadic and warlike life of the nations of India in
the land of the seven rivers, in connection with their removal
to the conquered land of the Ganges (1300 B.C.), gave place
to a more ordered social constitution, a priestly class formed
itself, which began to represent the people before the deity,
and from its chief function, Brahma, or prayer, took the name
of Brahmins, i.e., the praying. This Brahma, before whose
power even the gods must yield, was gradually exalted by the
Brahmins to the highest deity, to whom, under the name of
Brahma, the old Veda divinities were subordinated. Brahma
is no god of the people, but a god of the priests; not the
lord of nature, but the abstract and impersonal Being, out of
whom nature and her phenomena emanate. From Brahma
the priest derives his authority; and the system of caste, by
which the priesthood is raised to the first rank, its origin.
The worship of Brahma consists in doing penance and in
abstinence. Yama, once a celestial divinity, now becomes
the god of the lower world, where he who disobeys Brahma
is tormented after death. Immortality consists in returning
to Brahma; but is the portion only of the perfectly godly
Brahmin, while the rest of mankind can rise to this perfect
state only after many painful new births. The Brahmin, in
the exclusive possession of religious knowledge, reads and
expounds the Vedas (knowledge), exalted to infallible scripture,
and on them constructs his doctrine.

Thus the once vigorous, natural life of the Indians gave
place to a conception of the world which repressed the soul,
and annihilated man’s personality. The many-sidedness of
the earlier theology resolved itself into the abstract unity of
an impersonal All, and thus the glory of nature passed by
unmarked, as nought or non-existent, and lost its charm.
At the same time, the old heroic sagas were displaced by
legends of saints, and the heroic spirit of the olden epic by
an asceticism which repressed the human, and before whose
power even the gods stood in awe. With Brahminism the
religion lost its original and natural character, and became
characterized by a slavish submission to a priesthood, which
abrogated the truly human.

c. The Speculative Systems.

The doctrine of the Brahmins occasioned the rise of various
theological and philosophical systems. To these belong,
first, the “Vedanta,” (end of the Veda) or the dogmatic-apologetic
exposition of the Veda. This contains (1) the establishment
of the authority of the Veda as holy scripture revealed
by Brahma, and also of the relation in which it stands
to tradition; (2) the proof that everything in the Veda has
reference to Brahma; (3) the ascetic system, or the discipline.
To explain contradictory statements in the older and
later parts of the Veda, Brahminical learning makes use of
the subtleties of an harmonistical method of interpretation.
Second, the “Mimansa” (inquiry), devoted to the solution
of the problem, How can the material world spring from Brahma,
or the immaterial? According to this system, there is
only one Supreme Being, Paramatma, a name by which
Brahma himself had been already distinguished in Manu’s
book of law. Outside of this highest Being, there is nothing
real. The world of sense, or nature, (Maya, the female side
of Brahma), is mere seeming and illusion of the senses. The
human spirit is a part of Brahma, but perverted, misled by
this same illusion to the conceit that he is individual. This
illusion is done away with by a deeper insight, by means of
which the dualism vanishes from the wise man’s view, and
the conceit gives place to the true knowledge that Brahma
alone really exists, that nature, on the contrary, is nought,
and the human spirit nothing else than Brahma himself.
Third, the “Sankya” (criticism) originating with Kapila, in
which, in opposition to the “Mimansa,” the individual being
and the real existence of nature, in opposition to spirit, is
laid down as the starting-point, and the result reached is the
doctrine of two original forces, spirit and nature, from whose
reciprocal action and reaction upon each other the union of
soul and body is to be explained. Is this union unnatural,
then the effort of the wise man should be to free himself,
through the perception that the soul is not bound to the body,
from the dominion of matter. In this system, there is no
room for an infinite being, for, if a material world exist, then
must God be limited by its existence, and therefore cease to
be infinite, that is God. The Sankya philosophy here came
in conflict with the orthodox doctrine of the Brahmins, and
prepared the way for Buddhism.

d. Buddhism.

Against Brahminism Buddhism arose as a reaction. Siddharta,
son of Suddhodana, the King of Kapilavastu, of the
family of the Sakya, (about 450 B.C.) moved by the misery
of his fellow-countrymen, determined to examine into
the causes of it, and, if possible, to find means of remedying
it. Initiated into the wisdom of the Brahmins, but
not satisfied with that, after years of solitary retirement
and quiet meditation, penetrated with the principles of the
Sankya, he traversed the land as pilgrim (Sakya-muni, Sramana,
Gautama) and opened to the people of India a new
religious epoch. The tendency of the new doctrine was
to break up the system of caste, and free the people from
the galling yoke of the Brahminical hierarchy and dogmas.
While in Brahminism man was deprived of his individuality,
and regarded only as an effluence from Brahma, and tormented
by the fear of hell, and by the thought of a ceaseless
process of countless new births awaiting him after death,
whence the necessity of the most painful penances and chastisements,
Sakya-muni began with man as an individual, and
in morals put purity, abstinence, patience, brotherly love, and
repentance for sins committed above sacrifice and bodily mortification,
and opened to his followers the prospect, after this
weary life, no more to be exposed to the ever-recurring pains
of new birth, but released from all suffering to return to Nirvana,
or nothingness. While Brahminism drew a distinction
between man and man, and with hierarchical pride took no
thought of the Sudra or lower class of the people, and limited
wisdom to the priestly caste, Sakya-muni preached the equality
of all men, came forward as a preacher to the people, used
the people’s language, and chose his followers out of all
classes, even from among women. Both of these opposed
systems are one-sided. In Brahminism, God is all, and man,
as personal being, nothing; in Buddhism, man is recognized
as an individual, but apart from God, while in both systems,
the highest endeavor is to be delivered from, according to
Brahminism a seeming, according to Sakya-muni a really
existing individuality, the source of all human woe, and to
lose one’s self either in Brahma or in the Nirvana.

Less on account of his doctrine, in which there is found
neither a God nor a personal immortality, than on account of
the universal character of his words and of his life, Sakya-muni
continued in honor after his death, as the benefactor of
the people and as the Buddha, the wise, pre-eminently; and
afterwards was deified, and took his place in the ranks of the
recognized gods as their superior. Thus there arose in Buddhism,
by a departure from the doctrine of the master, a new
polytheism. This was afterwards, through the influence of
the Brahminical priestly caste, suppressed in India, but spread
over other parts of Asia, to the islands of the Indian Archipelago,
and also to China.

e. Later modification of Brahminism in connection with the
worship of Siva and Vishnu.

While Brahminism saw itself menaced by the steadily increasing
influence of Buddhism, the former nature-religion,
dispossessed by the Brahmins, asserted its rights in the worship
of Siva in the valleys of the Himalaya Mountains, and
in that of Vishnu on the banks of the Ganges. Siva is the
Rudra of the Veda, the boisterous god of storms, the giver
of rain and growth. Vishnu is the same divinity among
other races, conceived under the influence of a softer climate
in a modified form as the blue sky. Both divinities, originally
belonging to different parts of India, were afterwards taken,
first Vishnu, and then also Siva, into the theological system
of the Brahmins, and formed with Brahma, but not until the
fourth century after Christ, the trimurti, according to which
the one supreme being Parabrama is worshiped in the threefold
form of Brahma the creating, Vishnu the sustaining, and
Siva the destroying power of nature. To this later period of
Brahminism belongs also the alteration of the old epics, the
Ramayana and Mahabharata, by which the heroes Rama and
Krishna are represented as avatars, that is incarnations
or human impersonations, of Vishnu. In this also there
is evidently an effort to bring the deity, conceived as the
abstract One, into closer union with man, an effort which
is likewise visible in the later Yoga system of the Brahmins,
in which, by the admission of Buddhistic elements, the visible
world is recognized as real, the old rigid asceticism
mitigated, Vishnu represented as the soul of the world, and
immortality taught as a return of the individual soul to
Brahma.

2. THE WEST ARIANS, IRANIANS.

[THE BACTRIANS, MEDES, PERSIANS.]

The ancient religion of the Bactrians in the period before
Zoroaster was patriarchal, and consisted in the worship of
fire, as the beneficent power of nature, and of Mithras, the
god of the sun, combined with that of the good spirits (Ahuras),
among which were Geus-Urva (the spirit of the earth),
Cpento-mainyus (the white spirit), Armaiti (the earth, or
also the spirit of piety), and of the hero-spirits Sraosha, Traetona,
which as light and darkness are distinguished from Angro
(the black spirit).

Later, as it seems, the theology and worship of the neighboring
nomadic Arya penetrated to these nations, and caused
a religious conflict which ended with the migration of Arya
to the south. At this period Zarathustra[2] (Zoroaster) came
forward under the Bactrian priest and King Kava Vistaspa, as
defender and reformer of the religion of the fathers against
the encroachments of a strange doctrine. The Devas (Zend,
Dews) or the gods of the Indian Veda appear with Zarathustra
as evil spirits. Not Indra, but the hero Traetona, wages war
with Ahi (Zend, Azhi), while the kavis, or priests, are attacked
by him as deceivers and liars. From the belief in good spirits
(Ahuras, i.e., the living, and Mazdas, i.e., the wise), the
ancient genii of the country, Zarathustra developed the belief
of one highest God, Ahura-Mazda (Ormuzd, Greek,
[Greek: Osompzês]), a doctrine which he received by divine inspiration
through the mediation of the spirit Srasha. Ahura-Mazda,
surrounded by the Amesha-Spenta (Amshaspands), or the
holy immortals, not until later reduced to seven, is the creator
of light and life. The hurtful and evil, on the contrary, is
non-existence (akem), and in the oldest parts of the Avesta,
the Gathas, which go back to Zarathustra and his first followers,
is not yet conceived as a personal being. First in the
Vendidad, written after Zarathustra, does Angro-mainyus
(Ahriman), or the evil one, with his Dews, although subordinated
to Ahura-Mazda, gain a place in the Iranian conception
of the universe, as the adversary of Ahura-Mazda, and as the
cause of evil in the natural and spiritual world. From these
conceptions there was developed in the later Parsism the system
of the four periods of the world, each of three thousand
years, in the book “Bundehesh.” In the first period, Ahura-Mazda
appears as creator of the world and as the source of
good. The creation, completed by Ahura-Mazda in six days
by means of the word (Honover), is in the second period destroyed
by Angro-mainyus, who, appearing upon the earth
in the form of a serpent, seduces the first human pair, created
by Ahura-Mazda. In the third period, which begins with
the revelation given to Zarathustra, Ahura-mazda and Angro-mainyus
strive together for man. After this follows, in
the fourth period, the victory gained by Ahura-Mazda. Sosiosh
(Saoshyas), the deliverer already foretold in the Vendidad,
appears. The resurrection of the dead, not taught by
Zarathustra or in the Vendidad, takes place. The judgment
of the world begins; the good are received into paradise and
the sinners banished to hell. At last, all is purified, and
Angro-mainyus himself and his Dews submit themselves to
Ahura-Mazda, whose victory is celebrated in heaven with
songs of praise.

Thus among the Iranian races, out of the old patriarchal
worship of fire and light, on the occasion of the religious
struggle with the Indian Arya, and under the influence of
Zarathustra, there was developed the doctrine of one supreme
God,[3] who, surrounded by the good spirits of heaven, wages
war against evil, whence arose later the moral opposition
between Ahura-Mazda and Angro-mainyus resulting in the
victory of the good principle over the bad. The old dualism
of force and matter, beneficent and destructive powers of
nature, light and darkness, becomes in Parsism moral. The
deity, no longer identified with nature, becomes a personal,
spiritual being, the creator of mankind; and the end of the
world’s development is conceived as the triumph of the good.
Hence the high rank which the doctrine of Zarathustra and
its further development holds in the history of religion.

3. THE GREEKS.

As man rises in spiritual development, nature becomes to
him a revelation ever more and more manifold of the divine.
To the Greek (Pelasgi, Hellenes) the whole of nature was
living, and his imagination peopled her everywhere with divine
beings, who in wood and field, in rivers and on mountains
(Oreads, Dryads, Naiads, Sileni, &c.), hovered friendly
round him. The Greek was indeed distinguished from other
nations by this richer and more elevated view of nature; but
he excelled them most of all in this, that the divine object
which he worshiped was conceived both in form and character
after the human. Zeus, Phoebus Apollo, Pallas Athene,
Aphrodite, Ares, Hephaestus, Hestia, Hermes, Artemis, were
originally powers of nature personified, as some epithets in
Homer[4] still indicate; but they became, sometimes under
the same names, types of power and lordship, science and
art, courage and sensuous beauty. While Dionysus, Demeter,
Hades, and Persephone remained earthly, and Helios,
Eos, Iris, and Hecate, heavenly divinities, and Oceanus, Poseidon,
Amphitrite, Proteus, and Nereus ruled the waters, Zeus
was conceived as the god of the sky and of thunder, who
hurled the bolts, the great king and lawgiver, the father of
men, and Hera, originally the air, became the protecting goddess
of married life; Apollo, the god of light, who shot forth
his arrows, not at first identified with Helios, became the god
of divination and poetry, who led the choir of the muses; the
goddess of light, Athene, became the contentious goddess of wisdom;
Aphrodite, born of the foam of the sea, once the symbol
of the fruitful power of nature, later, encircled by the Graces,
became the type of womanly beauty and charm, to which the
strength of man, personified in Ares, corresponds. In like
manner in the later mythology, Hephaestus, the god of fire,
appeared as the god of the forge, Hestia, the goddess of fire,
as the protector of the household hearth, and Hermes, the
god of the storm and of rain, as the messenger of the gods,
the type of cunning and craftiness, while Artemis, the goddess
of the moon, the fruitful mother of nature, took the
character of the chaste maiden, the goddess of hunting, who
with her nymphs and hounds nightly roamed the fields and
woods. The monsters, the Sphinx, the Minotaur, the Cyclops,
the Centaurs, symbols of a yet unhuman or half human
power of nature, were overcome by the Greek heroes, Perseus,
Hercules, Jason, Theseus, Œdipus, the types of human
strength and valor. The religious festivals were enlivened
by trials of men’s strength and skill in games, and the historian
and poet offered to the gods the products of human
genius. In the religion of the Greeks, however, the moral
element, although not passed over and in the Greek epic and
tragedy not seldom expressed in grand characters, stood nevertheless
too little in the foreground, so that the worship of
the divine, as in the older nature-worship, especially in the
feasts in honor of Dionysus and Aphrodite, was marked by
immoral practices. The conception of a future life, which
taken in connection with a future retribution has a moral tendency,
had but little attraction for the Greek, who rejoiced in
the glory of the earth, and saw in nature and in man the
kingdom of the divine. The passage from the earlier poetical
nature-worship to the worship of the divine in human
form seems to be indicated in the war which Olympian Zeus
waged with Cronos and the Titans. The origin and development
of the various elements and powers of nature, Chaos,
Eros, Uranus, Gæa, the Giants, Styx, Erebus, Hemera, Æther,
&c., became, with the poets and philosophers after Homer,
matters of speculation, of which the theogonies of Hesiod,
Orpheus, Pherecydes, and others furnish proof.

4. THE ROMANS.

In the religion of the Greeks, the æsthetic and moral character
of the Grecian people was deified, and in the Romans
also we see how that which men value most exerts an influence
upon their worship of the divine. The primitive religion
of the Romans, borrowed from the Sabines and Etruscans,
bears everywhere, in distinction to that of the Greeks, the
marks of the practical and political character of the Roman
people. The oldest national divinities are, first, Jupiter or
Jovis, the god of the heavens, Mars or Mavors, the god of the
field and of war, Quirinus (Janus?) the protector of the Quirites,
afterwards, together with Juno (Dione) and Minerva,
worshiped in the Capitol, (Dii Capitolini); second, Vesta,
and the gods of the house and family, the Lares and Penates;
third, the rural divinities, Saturnus, Ops, Liber, Faunus,
Silvanus, Terminus, Flora, Vertumnus, and Pomona; fourth
and last, personifications, in part of the powers of nature,
Sol, Luna, Tellus, Neptunus, Orcus, Proserpina, in part of
moral and social qualities and states, such as Febris, Salus,
Mens, Spes, Pudicitia, Pietas, Fides, Concordia, Virtus, Bellona,
Victoria, Pax, Libertas, and others. Peculiarly Roman
also is the conception of the manes, or shades of the departed,
who hover as protecting genii about the living. Afterwards,
along with the culture of the Greeks, their gods
also were taken, although rather outwardly than inwardly,
into the spirit of the people, and the original character of the
gods of Latium was modified after the new mythology. Notwithstanding
this, however, the worship of the Romans retained
its political and practical character. The priests (sacerdotes)
Flamines, Salii, Feciales, the Pontifices with the
Pontifex Maximus at their head, the Augurs, were likewise
officers of the state, and did not form a hierarchy apart from
the state and alongside of it.

5. THE CELTS.

Among the Celtic tribes in Brittany, Ireland, and Gaul,
and on both banks of the Rhine, out of an aboriginal life of
nature characterized by wildness and license, religion developed
itself in the form of the worship of two chief divinities,
a male divinity, Hu, the begetting, and a female, Ceridwen,
the bearing, power of nature. The priesthood busied itself
with speculations about the divine, the origin of the world,
and the continued existence of man after death, conceived in
the form of the transmigration of souls. Nor did the people’s
faith lack the conception of good and evil spirits, fairies,
dwarfs, elves, which to the still childish fancy are objects of
fear or superstitious veneration. To the service of these divinities
the priesthood, the Druids, were consecrated, and beside
them the bards, or poets, held a more independent place.

6. THE GERMANS AND SCANDINAVIANS.

More developed intellectually is the nature-religion of the
ancient Germans (Teutons) and Scandinavians, which betrays
thereby the character of the Aryan race to which these nations,
like the Celts, originally belonged. The highest god
of the Germans is Wodan, called Odhin among the Norsemen,
the god of the heavens, and of the sun, who protects
the earth, and is the source of light and fruitfulness, the spirit
of the world, and the All-father (Alfadhir). From the union
of heaven and earth, there springs the god Thunar or Donar
among the Germans, Thor among the Norsemen, the bold
god of thunder who wages war against the enemies of gods
and men. Besides these there are the sons of Wodan, Fro
(German), Freyx (Norse), the god of peace, Zio (German), Tyx
(Norse), the god of war, Aki (German), Oegir (Norse), god of the
sea, Vol (German), Ullr (Norse), god of hunting, and others, to
whom are joined female divinities, such as Nerthus (German),
Jördh (Norse), the fruitful goddess of the earth, Holda (German),
Freiya (Norse), the goddess of love, Nehalennia, goddess
of plenty, Frikka (German), Frigg (Norse), the wife
of Wodan, mother of all the living, Hellia (German), Hel
(Norse), the inexorable goddess of the lower world. Opposed
to these divinities (Asen and Asinnen) stands Loko (German),
Loki (Norse), enemy of the divine. In addition to
these there appear in the Norse and German Sagas, besides
the heroes, a multitude of spirits, good and hostile, giants,
elves, Elfen (German), Alfen (Norse), white spirits of light, and
black dwarfs, house, forest, and water spirits. The worship
was most simple, and, as was the case with the ancient Semites,
the Indians of the Veda, and the Greeks, as yet independent
of temple service and priestly constraint. The holy
places of the Germans were woods, and hills, and fountains,
and in the mysterious rustling of the leaves and in the murmuring
of the waters the pious spirit caught the breathing of
the deity.[5] The father of the house is priest, and the recognition
by these races more than elsewhere of worth in woman
is apparent also in their religion. In the description of
the kingdom of the dead in the German-Norse mythology,
Walhalla is the abode of the heroes, hell the gathering place
of the other dead. Notwithstanding these still childish conceptions,
there was revealed in the moral character and heroic
spirit of the German forefathers the germ of a higher development,
which makes the nations of Germany and Northern
class=’center’Europe capable beyond others of a constantly higher conception
and estimation of the Christian religion.[6]

CHAPTER III.

THE RELIGION OF THE SEMITES.

I. THE PHŒNICIANS, SYRIANS, BABYLONIANS, CARTHAGINIANS,
AND ARABIANS.

In the Semitic races the religious spirit rose above nature-worship
in the effort to separate God from nature, and to
elevate him above nature as Lord, Baal (plural Baalim,
either from the different places where he was worshiped, or
the various names under which he was worshiped), Bel, El,
Adon (Adonis). Thus Bel among the Babylonians, Baal
among the Ammonites and Moabites, was the god of light,
the lord of heaven, the creator of mankind, who had his
throne above the clouds and was invoked on mountains.[7]
Also the title Molech and Baal Molech to designate the
Supreme Being among the ancient Phoenicians and Carthaginians,
and the nations nearest related to Israel, the
Moabites and Ammonites, as well as the derived names Milcom
(Kamos) [Chemosh, Eng. ver.], among the Ammonites,
and Melkartht at Tyre and Carthage, indicate, like Baal, an
original effort to conceive God as the ruler of nature. Agreeing
with this conception of the Deity, there is manifest, as
well in the worship of Baal as of Molech and the female Astarte
(Melecheth)[8] [Ashtaroth, Eng. ver.], worshiped with
him, partly in the abstinence from marriage, partly in the
human sacrifice, especially the sacrifice of the first-born, the
aim, through abnegation of the life of sense, and through the
sacrifice, even though unnatural, of what is dearest to man,
to appease a divinity who as lord and governor rules and subjects
to himself the power of nature and every propensity of
sense.[9]

In spite of the effort to elevate the Deity as Lord and
King above nature, most of the Semitic nations gradually
sank back into the old nature-worship, and, uniting with the
worship of the highest God, Baal and Bel, that of a female
divinity under the names of Baaltis, Beltis, Aschera, Mylitta,
they made religion to consist in the sacrifice of chastity to
the will of the Deity, as the fruitful, productive power of nature,
and thus fell into gross immorality.[10]

Religion appears in another form among the Semites in the
worship of the stars among the Babylonians and ancient Arabians.
This astrolatry, originally a kind of fetichism, became
nature-worship, and gradually rose to the worship of the intelligence
manifested to our contemplation in the movement
of the heavenly luminaries. Astrology arose, and religion
no longer expressed itself in passive acquiescence, but was
united with the effort to guide the life by the knowledge to be
drawn, as men imagined, from the motion of the stars.

ISRAELITISH RELIGION.

a. Its origin. The patriarchal religion. Mosaism.
Prophetism.

While most of the Semitic nations, in opposition to the
effort to elevate God above nature as lord and governor, returned
to the old nature-religion with its grossly sensual worship
of the divine, and others got no farther than to the conception
of a deity, who, like a consuming fire, stood opposed
to nature, and was to be appeased and propitiated by human
sacrifices, there was developed among the Israelitish people,
gradually and in constantly higher measure, in connection
with a higher moral and religious disposition, the worship of
God as a being who, though distinct from nature, is yet not
opposed to it, and thus no longer demands human sacrifices,
but obedience and moral consecration.

The common origin of the religion of the Israelites and
that of their Semitic relations, though hardly evident even in
the oldest monuments of the Hebrew literature, appears from
the following facts and particulars: firstly, the composition of
Israelitish names not only with El, but also with Baal, such
as Jerubbaal (adversary of Baal), (Gideon),[11] Esbaal,[12] Meribbaal,[13]
names which afterwards, on account of the aversion
which the ever-increasing distance in religion between the
Israelitish nation and the nations related to it must, from the
nature of the case, have inspired against the name of Baal,
are changed into Jerubboseth,[14] Isboseth,[15] and Mephiboseth[16],
as also the interchanging of El and Baal,[17] of Baal-jada[18]
and Eljada,[19] seem to point to an ancient period
when the name Baal (Lord) was used, like El, Elohim, El
Eljon, El Schaddai, Adonai, even among the Israelites, to
designate the Supreme Being. Secondly, the God of Abraham
(Elohim), although he desires no human sacrifices, nevertheless
praises the willingness of the father to offer up his
first-born, and sees in that the highest proof of devotedness
and obedience.[20] Thirdly, circumcision, already before Moses[21]
the bloody symbol of consecration to God,[22] and also
the right of Jahveh to the first-born, and the necessity of
ransoming them from him,[23] imply an earlier conception
of the deity as a being, who, although on a higher development
of the religion he is not indeed any longer thought
to desire human sacrifice, nevertheless has a right to such
a sacrifice, and thus demands indemnity for remitting it.
Fourthly, the later conception, of Jahveh as a destroying
fire, and the way in which the God of Israel is conceived
in connection with fire, and as manifesting himself in fire,[24]
betray, even in the midst of a more advanced religious development,
an original relationship with the like conceptions of
the other Semites. Fifthly, even in the orthodox Jahveh-worship,
some symbols, as the twelve oxen in the porch of
the temple,[25] the horns of the altar for burnt-offerings,[26] perhaps
also the in part oxlike form of the cherubim,[27] point to
an earlier worship of the deity under the form of an ox, the
symbol of the highest might, especially among the Semitic
races.[28]

In confirmation of the supposition thus suggested of a
community of origin in the religion of the Israelites and in
that of the nations related to them, there is also to be remarked,
firstly, the sympathy always felt among the people
of Israel for the worship of Baal and Molech, in face of the
strongest opposition on the part of the prophets;[29] secondly,
the statement of Amos,[30] that even in the wilderness the Israelites
worshiped Molech; thirdly, the fact that in the time
of the Judges, Jephthah offered his daughter to Jahveh,[31] and
still later the feeling, not driven out even by Mosaism, that
the wrath of Jahveh must be appeased by human blood,[32] a
necessity which David recognizes;[33] fourthly, the ancient
custom in Israel, as in the nations related to them, of worshiping
the deity on mountains and heights,[34] against which
the priestly legislation strove in the interest of the pure worship
of Jahveh;[35] fifthly, the heterodox worship of Jahveh in
the kingdom of the ten tribes under the form of a calf.[36]

From all this it seems fair to conclude that the religion of
the oldest forefathers of Israel had its root originally in one and
the same soil with the religion of the other Semites. Out of
an earlier nature-religion there developed among the Semites
the conception of Baal, the lord of nature, and of Molech with
his inhuman worship. While, however, the other Semites
remained in this lower stage, or rather sank back more and
more into the immorality of the nature-religion,—an hypothesis
suggested by a comparison of the religious state of the
nations of Canaan in Abraham’s time with their state at the
time of the conquest of the land by Joshua and afterwards,—in
the family of Abraham, religious consciousness rose to the
recognition of a deity, who, although he had a right to human
sacrifices, yet did not claim such sacrifices, but was satisfied
with men’s willingness to bring them to him. With this
higher development of religion, the names of the Supreme
Being, Baal and Molech, originally common to the whole race,
came more and more into contempt, and were regarded as the
expression of abominable idolatry,[37] while even the worship
of Jahveh under the form of a calf, originally permitted, was
later branded by the prophets as heresy.

Though it was in the family of Abraham that even in Mesopotamia[38]
the beginning of this higher development of the
Semitic religion showed itself, which, after his migration to
Canaan became the heritage of his family, yet the patriarch
of Israel did not stand alone in this respect among the Semites.
The old Canaanitish chieftains also of the patriarchal
period, Melchizedek and Abimelech, worship the same God
as he,[39] while on the other hand in his own family not all
traces of polytheistic superstition have disappeared,[40] and
these traces are also visible still later in Israel.[41]

The patriarchal religion, which afterwards with the great
majority fell into oblivion, was recalled afresh to men’s minds
by Moses, and the God of the fathers was preached by him
under the name before unknown of Jahveh,[42] to whom, with
the exclusion of all other gods, religious worship is due.[43]
The Jahveh of Moses, like the El Eljon of the patriarchs, is
the one only object of worship (Deus Unus), yet without excluding
the possibility of other gods existing.[44] Not until
later did the more developed conception of Jahveh arise as
the one only God (Deus unicus),[45] who is throned in heaven,
and like the Elohim of the patriarchs, encircled by celestial
beings (Bene Elohim, Malakim, Angels), who execute his
commands, yet are not objects of religious adoration.

The religious standpoint of Moses is the legal. Jehovah
stands related to his people as the Holy, as lawgiver and
judge; and the true moral consecration to God is symbolically
expressed in the ritual, especially in the sacrifice, while
the relation of the people to God is based upon the mediation
of the priests. Along with this, and out of Mosaism, after
the time of Samuel, prophetism was developed, in which independent
religious conviction, outside the limits of the
priesthood, and without distinction of rank or birth,[46] awoke
among the people. Prophetism, in the domain of religion, is
the development of the religious spirit to individual independence
and freedom. The prophet, rising above the legal
standpoint and outward ceremonial, puts the essence of true
worship in morality,[47] but recognizes also along with the
deepest feeling of dependence upon God, in the independence[48]
and spontaneity of the religious and moral life, the
irresistible power of the divine spirit, by which the Most
High, though apart from the world and throned in heaven,
puts himself into the closest and most intimate communion
with the true worshiper. Thus the gulf which divided Jahveh,
as a God afar off, from the world and his worshipers,
closed up more and more. With the conviction of the pureness
and truth[49] of her religion, Israel felt the calling to raise
it to the religion of the world, and in the realization of this
she saw the ideal of the future.[50]

b. The Israelitish religion after the Captivity.

The free character which distinguished prophetism in the
religion of Israel changed, after the return of the people
from captivity, especially with the party of the Pharisees, to
literalness and formalism. The prophets gave place to the
synagogue, the living proclamation of the truth to scriptural
erudition, the spirit of freedom to slavish subjection to Scripture
and tradition. As the ancient productions of the Indian
literature, originally the expression of the popular thought of
India, were elevated by the Brahmins into Veda, holy, inspired
scripture, so also the religious literature of Israel took
on the character of a closed Canon, so that what was once
the expression of religious life became now rule of faith.
The standpoint of the law which prophetism had already overcome
was again strongly maintained, the law enriched with a
number of new ordinances, and the essence of religion made
to consist partly in dogmatic speculation, partly in a merely
outward service, devoid of inner life. The Messianic prediction,
or the expectation that the kingdom, divided in Rehoboam’s
reign, once more united under a prince of the house
of David, should be exalted to new bloom and lustre,—which
in the older prophets was the natural and historically
explicable form in which the ideal of Israel’s future presented
itself to the seer, but which, under the influence of
the changed political conditions, had already been replaced in
the later prophecy by the more general conception of a future
triumph of the true religion of which Israel was the bringer,—[51]returned,
yet not as the ideal of the prophetic spirit, but as a
dogma, the product of scriptural interpretation. The pure
monotheism, by which formerly a place in the Providence of
God had been allotted to everything, even to moral evil,[52] became
corrupted, under the influence of Parsism, by the conception
of two kingdoms, of God and of the Devil. The
angels, originally the messengers of Providence, became under
mythological names, Gabriel, Raphael, Michael, &c., so many
middle beings who filled the space between the Deity, existing
apart from the world, and the world. The lower world
(sheol, [Greek: aidês]), formerly the general abode of the dead, of bad
and good without distinction, was split into two parts, paradise
and gehenna, and became a place of recompense, and, along
with this, religion, once an end, became the means of warding
off a dreaded punishment, or of gaining a future of bliss.
The doctrine of immortality, as the continuation of man’s
moral development, which was formerly unknown in Israel,
appeared, as in the later Parsism, in the form of a bodily resurrection
of the dead, at first of the righteous only, but afterwards
in the form of a general resurrection, by mediation
of the Messiah, at whose appearing, which was expected just
before the end of the present state of things, the great judgment
of the world, of living and dead, was to be held, heaven
and earth renewed, and the kingdom of God founded. Beside
the learned party of the Pharisees stood the Sadducees, who
subordinated religion to politics, rejected the Messianic idea
and the authority of tradition, and, in denying immortality in
the form of a bodily resurrection, failed to perceive the truth
of immortality, for whose recognition the premises and germs
existed in the religion of Israel, though not as yet developed.
The third party, that of the Essenes, was marked by quiet
piety, and in many respects also by excessive asceticism. In
the midst of the Pharisaic formalism, the unbelief of the
Sadducees, and the pietism of the Essenes, there was yet in
Israel a seed of true worshipers, who, though not above the
dogmatic prejudices of their time, had heart and mind open
for the true religion, and who set the true blessing to be
looked for from the Messiah in the satisfying of their religious
and moral needs.

3. THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.

The Israelitish religion, which reached its highest stage of
development in prophetism, but which among the later Jews
after Ezra degenerated, with the Pharisees into formalism and
worship of the letter, with the Essenes into mysticism and
asceticism, and which with the Sadducees, along with the
sacrifice of the prophetic ideal of the future, was subordinated
to politics, developed in Christianity, but freed from
once cherished national expectations and outward forms, into
a purely spiritual knowledge and worship of God. Jesus
fathomed the deep meaning of the religion of his people, and
its original fitness to become, through higher development,
the religion of the world. Jesus devoted himself to the end
of forming the human race into one great society (the kingdom
of heaven), of which religion should be the soul and life,
and, convinced of his calling, proclaimed himself as the Son
of man, who, as such, belonged not to Israel alone, but to
mankind. Jesus combated both the formalism and exclusiveness
of the Pharisees, and the unbelief of the Sadducees, and
with word and deed preached a religion which, independent
of all outward form, took hold of the human heart, and which,
developing into an independent principle in man, was to find
its commission, not in the authority of Scripture or tradition,
not even in that of his name, but in its own power
and truth. In him religion appeared as the power of self-sacrificing
love, which fears not even death, and to which dying
is not the losing of life, but the development of life. In
distinction from other religions, in which either God and man
are strangers to each other, and opposed to each other, or
man’s personality is, as it were, sunk in God, Christianity is
the religion by which man, in the full enjoyment of individual
development, and with the sense of his own strength, lives in
the consciousness of the most entire dependence upon God.
Religion in its highest form, conceived as the oneness of man
with God, is realized in Christianity.[53]

4. ISLAMISM.

The religion of the ancient nomadic tribes of the Arabian
peninsula originally exhibited a polytheistical character, in the
form of the worship, in part of sacred stones, in part of the
powers of nature, especially of the stars, whose position and
motion were thought to exert an influence, beneficent or
baneful, upon the destinies of men. With these conceptions
was combined a certain leaning toward monotheism, which
manifested itself especially in the common worship of Allah
taala (equivalent to El Eljon), which was afterwards quickened
and strengthened by association with the Jewish tribes,
with whom they held themselves to be related by descent
from Abraham. The Parsee doctrine of demons, also, was
not unknown in Arabia, after the conquest of the Persians in
the fifth century. After the third, fourth, and fifth centuries,
Christianity also, though in a corrupt form, or, definitely, in
the form of Monophysitism and Nestorianism, which had
been condemned by the church, became established in Arabia.

Amid such diverse elements, there was need of unity in
the domain of religion, a need for which Mohammed, after
the example of others of his family, sought to provide.

He was born at Mecca (571) of an honorable family, belonging
to the Koreish tribe. Finding no satisfaction for his
restless spirit in the trade to which after his parents’ death
he had at first devoted himself, he gave himself up, in solitary
retirement, to quiet meditation, and became more and more
convinced of his calling to put an end, by means of a better
religion, to the confusion existing among his countrymen with
regard to religion. The religious idea which overmastered
him presented itself to his powerful Oriental imagination in
the form of a vision as a revelation of Allah taala, made to
him in the fortieth year of his life by mediation of the angel
Gabriel. His conviction, thus acquired, was confirmed by
revelations afterwards received; and, shared at first with a
small circle of trusted friends, gradually spread wider, until
at last Mohammed came forward in the ancient sanctuary,
the Kaaba, at Mecca, as prophet of Allah. For this he was
pursued by his countrymen, and fled from thence to Medina,
in the year 622, the beginning of the Moslem era. The
number of his followers increasing, he had recourse to arms.
He conquered Mecca in 630, and made the Kaaba, after destroying
the idols in it, the sanctuary of the new religion.

The doctrine of Mohammed (Islam, submission to God,
whence his followers take the name of Moslems), is contained
in the Koran. The various Suras, or divisions, originally the
revelations received by the prophet at different periods of his
life reduced to writing, were, soon after his death, united by
Abu Bekr into one holy book, under the name of the Koran
(al Kitab, the book), which, like the Bible among the later
Jews and Christians, was clothed with divine authority. The
central doctrine of Mohammed is the belief in one God, Allah,
who, as the Creator and Lord of all things, in strictest
isolation from the world, is throned in heaven. All that takes
place upon the earth befalls according to the eternal decree
of God, a conception in which, at least among the Orthodox
Moslems, the Sunnites, who are distinguished in this respect,
as in others, from the dissenting Shiites, there is no place
left for human freedom. This God has from the earliest
times revealed himself to some privileged men, Adam, Noah,
Abraham, Moses, Jesus (Isa). To the last is due the honor
of having been the reformer of degenerate Judaism. He is
not, as the Christians of Mohammed’s time taught, the Son
of God in a metaphysical sense, much less God himself,—Allah
is one, he neither begets nor is begotten,—but a
prophet of human descent. The greatest and last prophet is
Mohammed himself, in whom prophetism reached its fulfillment.
Along with the doctrine regarding God and his relation
to the world, prayer, hospitality, and benevolence occupy
a prominent place in the teaching of Mohammed,
looked at from its practical side, and also the belief in a
future life, in the Jewish-Parsee form of the resurrection of
the dead, the judgment of the world, future reward and punishment,
paradise and hell. The truth of this divine revelation
rests upon the very fact of its having been revealed, and,
according to Mohammed, it no more needs scientific proof
than confirmation by miracles, to which Islamism did not appeal
until later.

The opinion which formerly prevailed among Christians
that Mohammed was an impostor, a false prophet, was bound
up with the conception that God, to the exclusion of other
nations, had revealed himself immediately and supernaturally
first to Israel, and afterwards through Christ to all mankind.
Hence it followed that Christianity was not prized as the
highest religion, existing along with less developed forms of
religion, but was opposed as the only true religion to all others,
which were regarded as the fruit of imposture and error,
an opinion to which the religious and political struggles in
which Islam and Christendom have been involved also richly
contributed. Mohammed was seer and prophet, filled with
fiery zeal for religion, and, while he stands indeed in this
respect, both personally and with regard to the contents of
his preaching and the means by which he sought to gain admission
for his doctrine, below the seers of Israel, and far
below the founder of Christianity, yet, on the other hand, his
monotheism, abstract as it is, must be regarded as a wholesome
reaction against the ever-increasing polytheistical superstition
to which in his time the Christian church of the
East especially had sunk. Islamism stands, however, below
original Christianity, the religion of Jesus and the Apostles,
in that, by separating God, as the abstract one Supreme Being,
from the world, it leaves no place for the doctrine of God’s
immanence, or the indwelling of the Spirit of God in man.
Hence in Islamism the divine revelation remains purely mechanical,
with no natural point of connection in man, and
therefore there is no possibility of an enduring prophetism,
which is the fundamental principle of Christianity. From
this separation of God and man, the Mohammedan doctrine of
predestination, in distinction from the Christian, acquires its
abstract and fatalistic character, whereby man, instead of being
regarded as a being in whose free activity God’s power
and life are glorified, is conceived as a passive instrument of
a higher power. To true moral independence, therefore, the
Moslem does not attain. His religion is legal and external,
and therefore intolerant and exclusive; and when Islamism,
led by excited passion and a heated imagination, disregarded
the sanctity of marriage, and held up as a reward before the
faithful Moslem a paradise characterized by sensual enjoyment,
it missed at once the deep moral and spiritual character
of Christianity. To these defects must be ascribed the fact
that Islamism, adapted to the need of the East, and therefore
spread over a large part of Asia and Africa, has not, with the
exception of the empire of Turkey, and for a time also of
Spain, penetrated Europe; and, overshadowed by a higher
development of humanity, has reached its highest bloom,
while Christianity, brought back to its original purity, remains
the religion of the civilized world.