Comparative Religion. J. Estlin Carpenter
of Leviticus or the Hindu Brāhmanas. What are sometimes called "Ethnic Trinities" may be examined in the light of Alexandrian theology. The suras of the Koran may be read after the prophecies of Isaiah. The various phases of the Buddhist Order, with its missionary zeal, its power of adaptability to different cultures, its readiness to accept new teaching, may be contrasted with the wonderful cohesiveness and expansion of the Roman Catholic Church. The ideas of the Hellenic mystery-religions may be found to throw light on the language of St. Paul. Out of the multitudinous phases of human experience all the world over innumerable resemblances will be discovered. Each is a fact for the student, and must be treated on equal terms in the field of science. But they will have more or less intrinsic significance in the scale of values. Philosophy may attempt to range them in gradations of worth, in nobility of form, in dignity of expression, in moral purity, in social effectiveness. Beneath infinite diversity the mystic will affirm the unity of the whole, with the poet of the Masnavi, Jalálu-'d-Dïn of Balkh (A.D. 1207–1273)—
"Because He that is praised is, in fact, only One,
In this respect all religions are only one religion."
[3] Broughton, Dictionary of all Religions, 1745.
The materials of comparison are, of course, of the most varied kind. The interest of the ancient Greeks was early roused in the diverse practices which they saw around them, and the observations of Herodotus concerning the Egyptians, the Persians, the Scythians, and many another tribe upon the fringe of barbarism, have earned for him the modern title of the "Father of Anthropology." Travellers, missionaries, government officers, men of trade and men of learning, have recorded the usages of the lower culture all over the world, naturally with varying accuracy and penetration, and a vast range of facts has been registered through successive stages of complexity in social and religious development. Many of these have their parallel in the folklore of countries where the uniformity of modern civilisation has not crushed out all traditional beliefs, while annual customs or even village games may contain survivals of what were once important ceremonial rites. The irruption of the Arab conquerors into Europe brought Christianity face to face with Mohammedanism and its sacred book. In the seventeenth century the Jesuit Fathers in China first made known the teachings of Kong-fu-tse ("Philosopher Kong") 500 B.C. whose name they Latinised into Confucius. Towards the end of the eighteenth century a brilliant little band of English scholars in Calcutta began to reveal the astounding copiousness of the sacred literature of India. During the expedition of Napoleon to Egypt in 1799 the Rosetta Stone (now in the British Museum) yielded the clue to the hieroglyphics which cover the walls of temple and tomb. A generation later a young British officer, Lieutenant Henry Rawlinson, began in 1835 to copy a triple inscription on a cliff of Mount Behistun, near Kermanshah in Persia. The work was dangerous and difficult, but he was enabled to complete it ten years later. It contained an identical record in three languages, Persian, Median, and Babylonio-Assyrian, and provided the means for deciphering the cuneiform script of the tablets and cylinders soon recovered from the mounds of Mesopotamia.
Meanwhile the lovers of the past were at work in many other directions. The Swedish Lonrott collected the ancient songs of the Finnic people, under the name of the Kalevala. Other scholars brought to light the treasures of Scandinavian mythology in the Icelandic Edda with its two collections of poetry and prose. In Wales and Ireland the texts which enshrined the Celtic faith awoke new interest. The students of classical antiquity began to collect inscriptions, and it was soon realised that the spade might be no less useful in Greece or Asia Minor than beside the Nile or the Euphrates.
The last century has thus accumulated an immense mass of material in literature and art. There are codes of law regulating in the name of deity the practice of family and social life. There are hymns of praise or of penitence, sometimes in strange association with the spells of magic. There are books of ritual and sacrifice, of ceremonial order, of philosophical speculation and moral precept. There are rules of discipline for religious communities; and there are pictures of judgment and delineations of the heavenly life. Sculpture and painting have been employed to give external form to the objects of pious reverence; and the architecture of the sanctuary has wrought into stone the fundamental conceptions of majesty, proportion, and grace.
All this, it is plain, rests upon history. When Confucius visited the seat of the imperial dynasty at the court of Chow, he studied with deep interest the arrangements for the great sacrifices to Heaven and Earth; he surveyed the ancestral temples in which the emperor offered his worship; he inspected the Hall of Light whose walls bore paintings of the sovereigns from the remotest times; and then he turned to his disciples with the remark: "As we use a glass to examine the forms of things, so must we study the past to understand the present." Comparison that confines itself solely to counting up resemblances here and there will be of small value. We cannot comprehend the real meaning of a single religious rite, a single sentence of any scripture, apart from the context to which it belongs. Acts and words alike issue out of experiences that may be hundreds of years old, and sum up generations, it may be whole ages, of a continuous process. To trace the successive forms of these changes, to describe the steps through which they have passed, is like making a chart of a voyage, and laying down the lines of continent and ocean, island and cape. Or just as the races of man are sorted, and their characteristics are enumerated without reference to the various causes which have produced their modifications, so geography and ethnography might companion hierography, the delineation of "the Sacred" in its concrete manifestations.
But behind the external evolution of a given religion, its modes of worship, its ministers, its doctrines, lie more complicated questions. What causes shaped these acts and moulded these beliefs? What elements of race are to be discerned in them? How can we account for the diversities between the religions of peoples belonging to a common stock, like those of India and those of ancient Italy? What have been the effects of climate, of the struggle with alien peoples and new environment? How does the food-supply influence the formation of religious ideas? What contacts have been felt with other races, and what positive loans or more impalpable influences have passed from one side to the other? We, find here in hierology, the science of "the Sacred," an analogue to the reasoning which accounts for the distribution of land and water, the rise of mountain ranges and the sculpture of valleys and river-beds out of the stratification of the earth's crust, and builds up a science of geology; or which traces the results of migration upon peoples, the consequences of inter-marriage with other tribes, the disastrous issues of war, surveys the immense variety of causes which have contributed to new developments of racial energy, and arranges this knowledge in the science of ethnology.
And, lastly, the values of these facts must be estimated. How far can they be accepted as expressing the reality of the Unseen Power, and man's relation to it? Hierology may explain how men have developed certain practices or framed certain beliefs; to determine their reasonableness is the task of the philosophy of religion or hierosophy.[4]
[4] These three terms have been suggested by Count Goblet d'Alviella, of Brussels.
The study of "Comparative Religion" assumes that religion is already in existence. It deals with actual usages, which it places side by side to see what light they can throw upon each other. It leaves the task of formulating definitions to philosophy. It is not concerned with origins, and does not project itself into the prehistoric past where conjecture takes the place of evidence. An old miracle-play directed Adam to pass across the stage "going to be created." Whether religion first appeared in the cultus of the dead, or only entered the field after the collapse of a reign of magic which had ceased to satisfy man's demands for help, or was born of dread and desired to keep its gods at a distance, only remotely affects the process of discovering and examining the resemblances of its forms, and interpreting the forces without and within which have produced them. The sphere of speculation has its own attractions, but in this little book an attempt will be made to keep to facts.
Three hundred years ago Edward Herbert,[5]