Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/597

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dice." Some obey, but the great mass of the society do, day by day, what will satisfy their interests according to the best knowledge they have or can get from the usages of the people around them. These acts and the thoughts, codes, and standards which go with them are the mores. Every people, therefore, takes out of its rehgion or out of the religion which is brought to it just what suits its tastes and its ways.

No religion of those which we call world-religions, and which have a complete system, is ever put in practice as a whole. The people always take out of it what suits their tastes and ideas, and that means especially their mores. Buddhism has run out into quite independent forms in Ceylon, Tibet, and China and has died out in Hindustan. Its excessive ritual, its contemplativeness, its futile learning, the phantasmagoria of supernatural beings which take the place of a god, its spells and charms and prayer-wheels bear witness to antecedent traits in the people who adopted it and which it has never overcome. The mores follow these traits, not the religious dogmas. All the elaborate (i. e., civilized) religions impose duties which are irksome, especially if they are interferences with interest or with human passions and appetites. The duties are neglected. Then comes fear of the anger of the deity. At this point ritual comes in as expiation, and atonement, especially in the forms of self-discipline, sacrifice, self -mutilation, scourging, fines, fast- ing, pilgrimages, church-going, etc. Consequently, when re- ligion is ritual and its methods of reconciling man and God are ritualistic, all the methods of self-discipline enter deeply into the mores. Mediaeval Christianity and Mohammedanism illustrate this by the importance ascribed to fasting. It is an active agent as it is employed. The English ritualists of the last sixty years have introduced ritual as an engine to teach the old doctrine of religion and to bring the interest of men back to the mediaeval views that the greatest interest of man is the apparatus and operation (sacraments) by which his fate in the other world may be decided. Zoroastrianism may very proba- bly be due, in the main, to one man, for it seems to be an invented system, but it came out of a body of magi who had