Comparative Religion. J. Estlin Carpenter
an Oxford scholar who played many parts and played them well, in deep revolt against the ecclesiastical doctrine that all the world outside the pale of the Church was doomed to eternal damnation, devoted himself to the study of comparative religion. With the materials which the classics afforded him, he examined the recorded facts among the Greeks and Romans, the Carthaginians and Arabs, the Phrygians, the Persians, the Assyrians. The whole fabric of human experience was built up, he argued, on certain common knowledges or notions, which could be distinguished by specific marks, such as priority, independence, universality, certainty, necessity for man's well-being, and immediacy. Here were the bases of law in relation to social order, and of religion in relation to the Powers above man. These principles in religion were five: (1) that there is one supreme God; (2) that he ought to be worshipped; (3) that virtue and piety are the chief parts of divine worship; (4) that we ought to be sorry for our sins and repent of them; (5) that divine goodness doth dispense rewards and punishments both in this life and after it. These truths had been implanted by the Creator in the mind of man, and their subsequent corruption produced the idolatries of antiquity.
[5] 1583–1648., elder brother of "Holy George Herbert."
The theory held its ground in various forms till its last echoes appeared in highly theologic guise in the writings of Mr. Gladstone. He pleaded that there must have been a true religion in the world before an untrue one began to gather and incrust upon it, and this religion included three great doctrines—the existence of the Triune Deity, the advent of a Redeemer, and the power of the Evil One and the defeat of the rebel angels. These had formed part of a primeval revelation. In the Homeric theology he traced the first in the three sons of Kronos—Zeus, Hades, and Poseidon. The second he found in Apollo, whose mother Leto represented the Woman from whom the Redeemer should descend. The rebel angels were equated with the Titans; the power of temptation was personified in Ate; the rainbow of the covenant was identified with Iris. The student of to-day can hardly believe that this volume could have been published in the same year in which Darwin and Wallace formulated the new scientific principle of "natural selection" as the great agent in the formation of species, and thus laid the foundation of the modern conception of evolution (1858).
It is on this great idea that the whole study of the history of religion is now firmly established. At the foundation of all endeavours to classify the multitudinous facts which it embraces, lies the conviction that whatever may be the occasional instances of degeneration or decline, the general movement of human things advances from the cruder and less complex to the more refined and developed. In the range of knowledge, in the sphere of the arts, in the command over nature, in the stability and expansion of the social order, there are everywhere signs of growth, even if isolated groups, such as the Australians, the Todas of India, or the Veddas of Ceylon, seem to be in the last stages of stagnation or decay. Religion is one phase of human culture, it expresses man's attitude to the powers around him and the events of life. Its various forms repose upon the unity of the race. The anthropologist is convinced that if a new tribe is discovered in some forest in central Africa, whether its stature be large or small, its persons will contain the same limbs as other men, and will live by the same physical processes. The sociologist expects that their social groups will approximate to other known types of human relations. The philologist anticipates that behind the obscurities of their speech he will find modes of thought which he can match elsewhere. The student of religions will in the same way be on the look-out for customs and usages akin to those which he already knows; he will assume that under similar conditions experience will be moulded on similar lines, and the streams of thought and feeling—though small causes may easily deflect their course—will tend to flow in parallel channels as they issue from minds of the same order, and traverse corresponding scenes.
And just as the general theory of evolution includes the unity of bodily structure and mental faculty, so it will vindicate what may be called the unity of the religious consciousness. The old classifications based on the idea that religions consisted of a body of doctrines which must be true or false, reached by natural reflection or imparted by supernatural revelation, disappear before a wider view. Theologies may be many, but religion is one. It was after this truth that the Vedic seers were groping when they cried, "Men call him Indra, Mitra, Varuna, Agni; sages name variously him who is but one"; or again, "the sages in their hymns give many forms to him who is but one." When the Roman Empire had brought under one rule the multitudinous peoples of Western Asia, North Africa, and Southern and Middle Europe, and new worships were carried hither and thither by priest and missionary, soldier and merchant and slave, the titles and attributes of the gods were freely blended and exchanged. Thinkers of different schools invented various modes of harmonising rival cults. When "Jupiter best and greatest" was surrounded by a vast crowd of lesser deities, the philosophic mind discerned a common element running through all their worship. "There is one Supreme God," wrote Maximus of Madaura to Augustine, about A.D. 390, "without natural offspring, who is, as it were, the God and Mighty Father of all. The powers of this Deity, diffused through the universe which he has made, we worship under many names, as we are all ignorant of his true name. Thus it happens that while in diverse supplications we approach separated, as it were, certain parts of the Divine Being, we are seen in reality to be the worshippers of him in whom all these parts are one." Here is the prayer of a Blackfoot chief of our generation in the great ceremonial of the Sun-Dance, reported by Mr. McClintock,[6] which blends the implications of theology with the impulses and emotions of religion—
[6] The Old North Trail, 1910, p. 297.
"Great Sun Power! I am praying for my people that they may be happy in the summer and that they may live through the cold of winter. Many are sick and in want. Pity them and let them survive. Grant that they may live long and have abundance. May we go through these ceremonies correctly, as you taught our forefathers to do in the days that are past. If we make mistakes, pity us!
"Help us, Mother Earth! for we depend upon your goodness. Let there be rain to water the prairies, that the grass may grow long and the berries be abundant.
"O Morning Star! when you look down upon us, give us peace and refreshing sleep.
"Great Spirit! bless our children, friends, and visitors through a happy life. May our trails lie straight and level before us. Let us live to be old. We are all your children, and ask these things with good hearts."
CHAPTER II
THE PANORAMA OF RELIGIONS
Twice in the history of the world has it been possible to survey a wide panorama of religions, and twice has the interest of travellers, men of science, and students of philosophy, been attracted by the immense variety of worships and beliefs. In the second century of our era the Roman Empire embraced an extraordinary range of nationalities within its sway. In the twentieth the whole history of the human race has been thrown open to the explorer, and an overwhelming mass of materials from every land confronts him. It may be worth while to take a hasty glance at the chief groups of facts that are thus disclosed, and make a sort of map of their relations.
I
The scientific curiosity of the ancient Greeks was early awakened, and Thales of Miletus (624–546 B.C.), chief of the seven "wise men," and founder of Greek geometry and philosophy, was believed to have studied under the priests of Egypt, as well as to have visited Asia and become acquainted with the Chaldean astronomy. Still more extensive travel was attributed to his younger contemporary Pythagoras, whose varied learning was explained in late traditions by his sojourn east and west, among the Persian Magi, the Indian Brahmans, and the Druids of Gaul. The first great record of observations is contained in the History of Herodotus of Halicarnassus on the coast of Asia Minor. Born in 484 B.C., six years after Marathon, and four years old when the