Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

When we take this view of the progress of humanity, it gives us an added respect for the Old World religious. thoughts which are now so foreign to us. It is difficult for us to comprehend those ideas and feelings. But such a study will prevent our looking with contempt upon the faraway efforts of those poor, struggling ancestors of ours, in their attempts to solve the problems that we ourselves are not wise enough to have completely solved even yet. We should remember that these early men were substantially the same kind of people we are. They thought just as well as they knew how. They felt as nobly as they were capable of feeling, and they made as honest endeavors to find God and worship him as we are making to-day.

As you know, all the early people of the world were polytheists,― believers not in one God, but in many gods. It used to be believed and I used to be taught it in youth— that there was originally a true revelation given to the world of the one true and only God, and that it was on account of the fall and the corruption of human nature that men fell away from this religion and became worshippers of idols. Milton touches this in his great poem. He hints that the fallen angels, after they had been cast out of heaven, travelled over the world, stealing away the hearts and the thoughts of men from the one true Creator. But, if you stop to think of it a moment, you will see that polytheism in many respects was not only natural, but inevitable in the early world. How long is it since civilization has grasped the conception of unity, that most magnificent discovery in many ways of the modern world? How long is it since the discovery of what is called the conservation and transformation of energy, or force, the discovery that all the different kinds of forces with which we deal are only varied manifestations of one force, the discovery of the unity of force? That is one of the most magnificent achievements of the nineteenth century. Not only is it true that the people did not know it a hundred thousand years ago, but down to the time of Newton there was no clear knowledge of that

force that holds the solar system together and keeps the stars and planets in their orbits. Kepler, one of the greatest thinkers of the world, could not conceive any power by which the planets moved and were held in their order except that he supposed each had a presiding angel that dwelt in it, and guided and controlled its motions. Newton, with his discovery of the great law of gravity, was the first to demonstrate the unity of that power that is manifested through the universe. Early man, then, as he looked around over the world and saw the manifestations of force in the heavens, in the lightning, in the waterfalls, as he heard it in the thunder, in the roar of the seas and the winds, thought that they were the result of an infinite multiplicity of powers at work. Being able to think of no power except that which was like what he manifested himself,- will power,- he naturally and necessarily thought that these manifestations of force were the work of different individuals, invisible to him. Polytheism then, and the thought of a multiplicity of powers manifesting themselves and governing nature, are perfectly natural and necessary,—not a fall from any preceding and higher condition of thought, but only the first feeble step of the intellect of man in his attempt to solve the mystery of things.

But take the next step. How did this primeval man come to think of there being invisible individuals, spirits, deities? How did such a thought enter his mind? How did he ever think of himself as having a soul? and how did he explain that conception so as to think of other things, other creatures, as having souls, that the universe was the scene of the activity of invisible persons?

This, again, was the most natural thing possible. It was the next step for him to take in his attempt at comprehending the universe.

I may not be able to explain it completely; but I will give you one or two hints of what the best thinkers of the world are accustomed to say about it. How did man think of himself as having a soul? We can easily discover hints

this way and that. For example, the savage has no sort of conception of the laws of reflection by which a shadow is created when he walks in the sun. He knows nothing of natural laws. He only sees here an image of himself that he knows is apart and separate from his body. When he looks into the water, he sees another self looking back at him. He goes away, and it disappears. A cloud passes over the sun, and the shadow is gone. He has no knowledge of the fact that it is the interception of the rays of the sun that caused that shadow to disappear. While he sleeps, he dreams, and do not smile at the child-man's interpretation of his dream; for no one living, even at this time in the history of the world, has ever been able to interpret the simplest dream. What did the primeval man think about it? While he was asleep, he went off on a journey. He visited another country, he talked with other tribes, with friends that he had known, with those whom he thought were dead. When he came back,- as he would express it, or waked up, his friends would tell him that his body had been in that particular place all the time; and yet he knew, or thought he did, that he had been away. That body, then, he reasoned, could not be the body which had travelled. There must be another, an invisible, self,- this self that he sometimes saw as a shadow, that looked at him out of the placid face of the pool, a self which came and went in a mysterious manner. That is, he learned naturally and necessarily to believe that he had a double that was different from the body, that was ordinarily invisible, that came and went without regard to the difficulties of the coming or the going. When he reached that conclusion about himself, he interpreted death in the light of it. When he dreamed, this self went away for a while, and then came back. When he saw a friend lying quiet day after day, and the other self did not come back, and he found that it had gone away permanently, he did not doubt that that other self lived somewhere. It had only gone to the world of spirits; and that to him was death.

And he naturally believed, not only that he had a second self, but that other things might have,- dogs, horses, birds, and even inanimate things. In this way he would learn to think that there might be in the lightning and cloud, the stars and the moon, and all the natural forces of the world. one of those invisible beings that he would come to look upon as a spirit, and at last as a god.

What was the nature of those invisible beings as he thought of them? Were they good or bad? They were very much like the people with whom he associated. Some of them were good, and some of them bad. Some of them were either, just as were his associates and friends. He learned to think of the invisible power that controlled those forces that hurt him as being evil, at least to him, as being angry with him, as being out of temper with him in some way; and he thought that he must do something to placate and please them. The spirits that inhabited those forces that he learned to think of as beneficent and helpful were his friends. The characteristics of these invisible spirits would naturally be varied.

By and by, through a natural process of development, he would come to select some one of these deities as his particular god. A tribe would look upon some god as its tribal god, and would look with suspicion upon other gods. When one nation conquered another, the gods were supposed to engage in the conflict; and the gods of the conquered nation were themselves conquered, and, being naturally hostile to their conquerors, they would attempt to work evil. Thus you see how naturally the idea of malignant spirits would arise. These only as hints of what would take hours to detail.

The next step is the relation in which these old-time gods stood to their worshippers. I have already told you that, through some process of thought or other, some one particular god would be selected as the god of a tribe. I want to hint to you what was the great act of worship in those old times; and I want you to note how modern our discovery

of this is. You are familiar with the fact that the one great central act of worship in all ages and religions has been the act of sacrifice,-the sacrifice of some bird, some animal, or of man, to win the favor or the love of the deity. It is only within the last few years that the world has found out what it had forgotten for thousands and thousands of years, the meaning of this act of sacrifice. What did it mean? An Arab tribe, however hostile to any other tribe, under some peculiar set of circumstances will admit a stranger into one of its tents; and some Arab chieftain will eat with him. After that the chieftain, no matter how bitter an enemy he may be, is under bonds to be his friend, to guard and protect him. He has eaten with him, they have shared together the sacred meal. Sacrifice originally was just this eating together of the god and the people. They would take some sacred animal,- some animal that had in it the life which was held in common by the people and the god,—and the priest, by some prescribed formula, would slay the animal, and pour out his blood on the stone which was the symbol of the deity. The deity was supposed to consume the blood; while the other part of the animal, or some particular parts of it, were eaten by the people. It was supposed that in this sacrificial feast the god and his people had eaten together; and the god, like an Arab sheik, was thereafter under bonds to guard and care for his people. Here is the secret of the meaning of sacrifice, which has been so universal all over the world and in every age and time.

But I must hasten from one point to another.

I wish to raise the question as to the moral character of these gods, and the effect of their worship on the people. You will do great injustice to those poor barbarous tribes to suppose that at the beginning they ever worshipped a god that, according to their standard, was immoral or evil. The god, when they first accepted him as their own, was the highest ideal of thought and conduct which that tribe had attained; and he was expected to enforce the customs and ideas of that tribe. Not only did he have no care for an

« AnteriorContinuar »