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DISSOCIATING PRINCIPLE

BOOK 1.

religious necessities of the age. Thus the world, peaceably united under one temporal monarchy, might be compared to a vast body without a soul. The throne of the human mind appeared vacant; among the rival competitors for its dominion, none advanced more than claims local, or limited to a certain class. Nothing less was required than a religion coextensive at least with the empire of Rome, and calculated for the advanced state of intellectual culture: and in Christianity this new element of society was found; which, in fact, incorporating itself with manners, usages, and laws, has been the bond which has held together, notwithstanding the internal feuds and divisions, the great European commonwealth; maintained a kind of federal relation between its parts; and stamped its peculiar character on the whole of modern history.

principle of

Christianity announced the appearance of its Divine Dissociating Author as the era of a new moral creation; old religions. and if we take our stand, as it were, on the isthmus which separates the ancient from the modern world, and survey the state of mankind before and after the introduction of this new power into human society, it is impossible not to be struck with the total revolution in the whole aspect of the world. If from this point of view we look upward, we see the dissociating principle at work both in the civil and religious usages of mankind; the human race breaking up into countless independent tribes and nations, which recede more and more from each other as they gradually spread over the surface of the earth; and in some parts, as we adopt the theory of the primitive barbarism, or that of the de

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The notion that the primeval | in the philosophy of the two last censtate of man was altogether barbarous turies (for Dryden's line. and uncivilised, so generally prevalent Since wild in woods the noble savage ran,

CHAP. I.

OF OLD RELIGIONS.

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generacy of man from an earlier state of culture, either remaining stationary at the lowest point of ignorance and rudeness, or sinking to it; either resuming the primeval dignity of the race, or rising gradually to a higher state of civilisation. A certain diversity of religion follows the diversity of race, of people, and of country. In no respect is the common nature of human kind so strongly indicated as in the universality of some kind of religion; in no respect is man so various, yet so much the same. All the religions of antiquity, multiform and countless as they appear, may be easily reduced to certain classes, and, independent of the traditions which they may possess in common, throughout

contains the whole theory of Rousseau), has encountered a strong reaction. It is remarkable that Niebuhr in Germany, and Archbishop Whately in this country, with no knowledge of each other's views, should at the same time call in question this, almost established theory. Dr. Whately's argument, that there is no instance in his tory of a nation self-raised from savage life, is very strong. I have been much struck by finding a very vigorous and lucid statement to the same effect, in an unpublished lecture of the late Lord Stowell (Sir William Scott), delivered when Professor of History at Oxford. The general bias, however, of later opinion certainly favours the progressive development from a ruder state. Mr. Darwin's theory would, of course, educe us from something lower than the lowest barbarism. All the theories of the progressive education of the human race tend to the same conclusion. So, too, the discoveries of human implements of the simplest

kind, in not very recent geological formations (as to human remains, we have now the verdict of Sir C. Lyell; yet the question is again in suspense); the remarkable researches of the Northern antiquarians into the successive ages of flint, copper, and iron; the lacustrine cities so singularly traced in many parts of the world, which indicate a state of extremely imperfect civilisation. Yet this rude condition of the primitive inhabitants of Europe is by no means decisive against a high state of advancement in the primal stock in the East, including Egypt. The argument from language, according to that consummate master of the science, M. Max Müller, on the whole, as must be the case in all works which aspire to resolve language into its primitive elements, tends strongly towards slow and progressive development. Yet the more perfect structure, as it seems, of some of the earliest languages, must have its due weight in our general determination.

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PRIMARY PRINCIPLES OF RELIGION. Book I.

the whole, reigns something like a family resemblance. Whether all may be rightly considered as depravations of the same primitive form of worship; whether the human mind is necessarily confined to a certain circle of religious notions; whether the striking phenomena of the visible world, presented to the imagination of various people in a similar state of civilisation, will excite the same train of devotional thoughts and emotions, the philosophical spirit, and extensive range of inquiry, which in modern times have been carried into the study of mythology, approximate in the most remarkable manner the religions of the most remote countries. The same primary principles everywhere appear, modified by the social state, the local circumstances, the civil customs, the imaginative or practical character of the people.

The best, in my opinion, and most comprehensive work on the ancient religions, is the (yet unfinished) translation of Creuzer's Symbolik, by M. de Guigniaut, Religions de l'Antiquité, Paris, 1825, 1835. It is far superior in arrangement, and does not appear to me so obstinately wedded to the symbolic theory as the original of Creuzer. The Aglaophamus of Lobeck, as might be expected from that distinguished scholar, is full of profound and accurate erudition. Yet I cannot but think that the Grecian polytheism will be better understood, when considered in connexion with the other religions of antiquity, than as an entirely independent system; and surely the sarcastic tone in which M. Lobeck speaks of the Oriental studies of his contemporaries is unworthy of a man of consummate learning. The work of the late M. Constant, Sur la

Religion, extensive in research, ingenious in argument, and eloquent in style, is in my, perhaps partial, judgment, vitiated by an hostility to every kind of priesthood, better suited to the philosophy of the last than of the present century. M. Constant has placed the evils of sacerdotal influence in the strongest light, and disguised or dissembled its advantages. The ancient priestly castes, I conceive, attained their power over the rest of their race by their acknowledged superiority; they were the benefactors, and thence the rulers, of their people: to retain their power, as the people advanced, they resorted to every means of keeping men in ignorance and subjection, and so degenerated into the tyrants or the human mind. At all events, sacerdotal domination (and here M. Constant would have agreed with me) is altogether alien to genuine Christianity.

CHAP. I.

FETICHISM - TSABAISM.

Fetichism.

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Each state of social culture has its characteristic theology, self-adapted to the intellectual and moral condition of the people, and coloured in some degree by the habits of life. In the rudest and most savage races we find a gross superstition, called by modern foreign writers Fetichism, in which the shapeless stone, the meanest reptile, any object however worthless or insignificant, is consecrated by a vague and mysterious reverence, as the representative of an unseen Being. The beneficence of this deity is usually limited to supplying the wants of the day, or to influencing the hourly occurrences of a life, in which violent and exhausting labour alternates either with periods of sluggish and torpid indolence, as among some of the North American tribes; or, as among the Africans, with wild bursts of thoughtless merriment. This Fetichism apparently survived in more polished nations, in the household gods, perhaps in the Teraphim, and in the sacred stones (the Botylia), which were thought either to have fallen from heaven, or were sanctified by immemorial reverence.

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In the Oriental pastoral tribes, Tsabaism," the simpler worship of the heavenly bodies, in general prevailed; which among the agricultural races

The Fetiche of the African is the Manitou of the American Indian. The word Fetiche was first, I believe, brought into general use in the curious volume of the President De Brosses, Du Culte des Dieux Fétiches. The word was formed by the traders to Africa, from the Portuguese, Fetisso, chose fée, enchantée, divine, ou rendant des oracles. De Brosses, p. 18.

Hume (History of Nat. Religion) argues that a pure and philosophical

Tsabaism.

theism could never be the creed of a barbarous nation struggling with want.

"The astral worship of the East is ably and clearly developed in an Excursus at the end of Gesenius's Isaiah. I use Tsabaism in its popular sense. The proper signification and limitation of the word must be sought in the profoundly learned work of Chwolsohn, die SSabier und der SSabaismus, St. Petersburg, 1856.

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Nature

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grew up into a more complicated system, connecting the periodical revolutions of the sun and moon with the pursuits of husbandry. It was Nature-worship, worship. simple in its primary elements, but branching out into mythological fables, rich and diversified in proportion to the poetic genius of the people. This Natureworship in its simpler, probably its earlier form, appears as a sort of dualism, in which the two great antagonist powers, the creative and destructive, Light and Darkness, seem contending for the sovereignty of the world, and, emblematical of moral good and evil, are occupied in pouring the full horn of fertility and blessing, or the vial of wrath and misery, upon the human race. Subordinate to, or as a modification of, these two conflicting powers, most of the Eastern races concurred in deifying the active and passive powers of generation. The sun and the earth, Osiris and Isis, formed a second dualism. And it is remarkable how widely, almost universally extended throughout the earlier world, appears the institution of a solemn period of mourning about the autumnal, and of rejoicing about the vernal, equinox.* The suspension, or apparent extinction of the great

Plutarch, de Iside et Osiride:- between the usages of so many disΦρύγες τὸν θεὸν οἰόμενοι χειμῶνος | tinet nations in the New World as μὲν καθεύδειν, θέρους δ' ἐγρηγορέναι, well as the Old, in Peru and Florida, τότε μὲν κατευνασμοὺς τότε δ ̓ ἀνε- in Gaul and Britain, as in India and γέρσεις βακχεύοντες αὐτῷ τελοῦσι. Syria, without some such common Παφλαγόνες δὲ καταδεῖσθαι καὶ και origin, or a common sentiment springθείργνυσθαι χειμῶνος, ἦρος δὲ ἀνα- ing from a certain kindred and identity λύεσθαι φάσκουσι. in human nature. See Picart's large work, Cérémonies et Coutumes Religieuses, passim.

Bohlen (das Alte Indien, p. 139 et seq.) gives a long list of these festivals of the sun. Lobeck (i. 690) would altogether deny their symbolical character. It is difficult, however, to account for the remarkable similarity

Compare likewise Dr. Pritchard's valuable work on Egyptian Mythology; on the Deification of the Active and Passive Powers of Generation;

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