and a sort of lofty poetical religious philosophy, with the most monstrous and incoherent superstitions; and the appearance of the profound political religion of Egypt in strange juxta-position with the most debasing Fetichism, the worship of reptiles and vegeta bles (1). of the From this Nature-worship arose the beautiful anthropomorphism Anthropeof the Greeks, of which the Homeric poetry, from its extensive and morphism lasting popularity, may in one sense be considered the parent. The Greeks. primitive traditions and the local superstitions of the different races were moulded together in these songs, which, disseminated throughout Greece, gave a kind of federal character to the religion of which they were, in some sort, the sacred books. But the genius of the people had already assumed its bias: few, yet still some, vestiges remain in Homer of the earlier theogonic fables (2). Conscious, as it were, and prophetic of their future pre-eminence in all that constitutes the physical and mental perfection of our race, this wonderful people conformed their religion to themselves. The cumbrous and multiform idol, in which wisdom, or power, or fertility, were represented by innumerable heads or arms, or breasts, as in the Ephesian Diana, was refined into a being, only distinguished from human nature by its preterhuman development of the noblest physical qualities of man. The imagination here took another and a nobler course; it threw an ideal grandeur and an unearthly loveliness over the human form, and by degrees deities became men, and men deities, or, as the distinction between the godlike ( Deoɛízeλ05) and the divine ( Deos) became more indistinct, were united in the intermediate form of heroes and demi-gods. The character of the people here, as elsewhere, operated on the religion; the religion re-acted on the popular character. The religion of Greece was the religion of the Arts, the Games, the Theatre; it was that of a race, living always in public, by whom the corporeal perfection of man had been carried to the highest point. In no other country would place, is happy, they tell us, to have an object on which human feelings and human senses may again find repose. To give a metaphysical deity to ignorant and sensual men, absorbed in the cares of supporting animal existence, and entangled in the impediments of matter, would be to condemn them to atheism. Such is the mode in which the brahmins excuse the gross idolatry of their religion." William Erskine, Bombay Transactions, i. 199. Compare Colebrooke, Asiat. Res. vii. 279.; and other quotations in Bohlen, Das Alte Indien, i: 153., which indeed might be multiplied without end. Mr. Mill (Hist. of India), among the ablest and most uncompromising opponents of the high view of Indian civilisation, appears to me not to pay sufficient attention to this point. (1) Heeren has conjectured, with his usual ingenuity, or rather perhaps has adopted from De Brosses, the theory, that the higher part of the Egyptian religion was that of a foreign and dominant caste; the worship of plants and brutes, ¥ the original undisturbed Fetichism of the pri- Religion of Rome. Moral Ele the legislator have taken under his protection the physical conformation, in some cases the procreation, in all the development of the bodily powers by gymnastic education; and it required the most consummate skill in the sculptor to preserve the endangered preeminence of the gods, in whose images were embodied the perfect models of power and grace and beauty (1). The religion of Rome was political and military (2). Springing originally from a kindred stock to that of earlier Greece, the rural Gods of the first cultivators of Italy (3), it received many of its rites from that remarkable people, the Etruscans; and rapidly adapted itself, or was forced by the legislator into an adaptation to the character of the people (4). Mars or Gradivus was the divine ancestor of the race (5). The religious calendar was the early history of the people; a large part of the festivals was not so much the celebration of the various deities, as the commemoration of the great events in their annals (6). The priesthood was united with the highest civil and military offices; and the great occupation of Roman worship seems to have been to secure the stability of her constitution, and still more, to give a religious character to her wars, and infuse a religious confidence of success into her legionaries. The great office of the diviners, whether augurs or aruspices, was to choose the fortunate day of battle; the Fetiales, religious officers, denounced war: the standards and eagles possessed a kind of sanctity; the eagle was in fact a shrine (7). The altar had its place in the centre of the camp, as the ark of God in that of the Israelites. The Triumph may be considered as the great religious ceremony of the nation; the god Terminus, who never receded, was, as it were, the deified ambition of Rome. At length Rome herself was impersonated and assumed her rank in heaven, as it were the representative of the all-conquering and all-ruling republic. There was a stronger moral element in the Roman religion, than in that of Greece (8). In Greece the gods had been repre (5) Et tamen ante omnes Martem coluere priores, Hoc dederat studiis bellica turba suis. After reciting the national deities of other cities, Mars Latio venerandus erat; quia præsidet armis, The month of Mars began the year. Ibid. (7) Ο γάρ ἀετὸς ὠνομασμένος (ἐστὶ δὲ νεώς μικρός) καὶ ἐν αὐτῷ ἀετὸς χρυσοῦς vidpurai, Dion. Cass. xl. c. 18. Gibbon, i. 16. Moyle's Works, ii. 86. Compare Tac. Ann. i. 39. (8) The distinction between the Roman and Greek religions is drawn with singular felicity in the two supplemental (in my opinion the most valuable and original), but unfortunately, unfinished volumes of M. Constant, Du Polythéisme Romain. sented, in their collective capacity, as the avengers of great crimes; a kind of general retributive justice was assigned to them; they guarded the sanctity of oaths. But in the better days of the republic, Rome had, as it were, deified her own virtues. Temples arose to Concord, to Faith, to Constancy, to Modesty (Pudor), to Hope. The Penates, the household deities, became the guardians of domestic happiness. Venus Verticordia presided over the purity of domestic morals (1), and Jupiter Stator over courage. But the true national character of the Roman theology is most remarkably shown in the various temples, and various attributes assigned to the good Fortune of the city, who might appear the Deity of Patriotism (2). Even Peace was at length received among the gods of Rome. And as long as the worship of the heart continued to sanctify these impersonations of human virtues, their adoration tended to maintain the lofty moral tone; but as soon as that was withdrawn, or languished into apathy, the deities became cold abstractions, without even that reality which might appear to attach itself to the other gods of the city: their temples stood, their rites were perhaps solemnised, but they had ceased to command, and no longer received the active veneration of the people. What, in fact, is the general result of the Roman religious calendar, half a year of which is described in the Fasti of Ovid? There are festivals founded on old Italian and on picturesque Grecian legends; others commemorative of the great events of the heroic days of the republic; others instituted in base flattery of the ruling dynasty; one ceremonial only, that of the Manes (3), which relates to the doctrine of another life, and that preserved as it were from pride, and as a memorial of older times. Nothing can show more strongly the nationality of the Roman religion, and its almost complete transmutation from a moral into a political power (4). Amidst all this labyrinth, we behold the sacred secret of the divine Unity, preserved inviolate, though sometimes under the most adverse circumstances, and, as it were, perpetually hovering on the verge of extinction, in one narrow district of the world, the province of Palestine. Nor is it there the recondite treasure of a high and learned caste, or the hardly worked-out conclusion of the thinking and philosophical few, but the plain and distinct groundwork of the popular creed. Still, even there, as though in its earlier period, the yet undeveloped mind of man was unfit for the reception, or at least for the preservation of this doctrine, in its perfect • (1) The most virtuous woman in Rome was chosen to dedicate her statue, Val. Max. viii, 15. (2) Constant, i. 16. (3) II. 533. The Lemuria (Remuria) were instituted to appease the shade of Remus, V. 451, etc. Ovid applies on another occasion his general maxim Pro magnâ teste vetustas (4) See the fine description of Majestas (Fasti, Religion of the spiritual purity; as though the Deity condescended to the capacities of the age, and it were impossible for the divine nature to maintain its place in the mind of man, without some visible representative; a kind of symbolic worship still enshrines the one great God of the Mosaic religion. There is a striking analogy between the Shechinah (1) or luminous appearance which "dwelt between the cherumbim," and the pure immaterial fire of the Theism, which approaches nearest to the Hebrew, that of the early Persians. Yet even bere likewise is found the great indelible distinction between the religion of the ancient and of the modern world; the characterístic, which besides the general practice of propitiating the Deity, usually by animal sacrifices, universally prevails in the præ-Christian ages. The physical predominates over the moral character of God under the Deity. God is Power in the old religion, he is Love under the new. Nor does his pure and essential spirituality, in the more new Reli- complete faith of the gospel, attach itself to, or exhibit itself under any form. "God," says the divine author of Christianity, "is a Spirit, and they that worship him, must worship him in spirit and in truth." In the early Jewish worship, it was the physical power of the Deity, which was presented to the mind of the worshipper: he was their temporal king, the dispenser of earthly blessings, famine and plenty, drought and rain, discomfiture or success in war. The miracles recorded in the Old Testament, particularly in the earlier books, are amplifications, as it were, or new directions of the powers of nature; as if the object were to show that the deities of other nations were but subordinate and obedient instruments in the hand of the great self-existent being, the Jehovah of Jewish worship. the old and the gion. Yet, when it is said that the physical rather than the moral character of the Deity predominated, it must not be supposed that the latter was altogether excluded. It is impossible entirely to dissociate the notion of moral government from that belief, or that propensity to believe, in the existence of a God implanted in the human mind; and religion was top useful an ally, not to be called in to confirm the consciously imperfect authority of human law. But it may be laid down as a principle, that the nearer the nation approaches to barbarism, the childhood of the human race, the more earthly are the conceptions of the Deity; the moral aspect of the divine nature seems gradually to develope itself with the development of the human mind. It is at first, as in Egypt and India, the prerogative of the higher class; the vulgar are left to their stocks and their stones, their animals and their reptiles. In the republican states of Greece, the intellectual aristocracy of the philosophers, (1) Even if the notion of a visible Shechinah was of a later period, (note to Heber's Bampton Lectures, p. 278.); God was universally believed to have a local and personal residence behind the veil, in the unapproachable Holy of Holies; and the imagination would thus be even more powerfully excited than by a visible symbol. guarded by no such legally established distinction, rarely dared openly to assert their superiority; but concealed their more extended views behind a prudential veil, as a secret or esoteric doctrine, and by studious conformity to the national rites and ceremonies. tion for new Reli Heathen Gradually, however, as the period approaches, in which the reli- Preparagion of civilisation is to be introduced into the great drama of human life, as we descend nearer towards the point of separation gion in the between the ancient and modern world, the human mind appears World. expanding. Polytheism is evidently relaxing its hold upon all classes; the monarch maintains his throne, not from the deep.. rooted, or rational, or conscientious loyalty of his subjects, but from the want of a competitor; because mankind were habituated to a government which the statesman thought it might be dangerous, and the philosopher, enjoying perfect toleration, and rather proud of his distinctive superiority, than anxious to propagate his opinions throughout the world, did not think it worth while, at the hazard of popular odium, to disturb. Judaism gaye manifest indications of a preparation for a more Among essentially spiritual, more purely moral faith. The symbolic pre- the Jews. sence of the Deity (according to their own tradition (1) ceased with the temple of Solomon; and the heathen world beheld with astonishment a whole race whose deity was represented under no visible form or likeness. The conqueror Pompey, who enters the violated temple, is filled with wonder at finding the sanctuary without image or emblem of the presiding deity (2); the poet describes them as worshipping nothing but the clouds and the divinity that fills the Heaven (3); the philosophic historian, whose profounder mind seems struggling with hostile prejudices, defines with his own inimitable compression of language, the doctrine to the sublimity of which he has closed his eyes. "The worship of the Jews is purely mental; they acknowledge but one God.-and that God supreme and eternal, neither changeable, nor perishable (4)". The doctrine of another life (which derived no sanction from the Law, and was naturally obscured by the more immediate and intelligible prospect of temporal rewards and punishments,) dawns in the prophetic writings; and from the apocryphal books and from Josephus, as well as from the writings of the New Testament, clearly appears to have become incorporated with the general sentiment. Retribution in another life has already taken the place of the immediate or speedy avenging or rewarding providence of the Deity in the land of Canaan (5). Judaism however only required to expand with the expansion Hist. of the Jews, ii. 10. lb. ii. 70. (3) Nil præter nubes et cœli numen adorant. Juv. xiv. 97. (4) Judæi mente solâ, unumque numen intelli gunt. sumed. |