Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/806

 792 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

In closing let me revert to the one example to which I have devoted myself especially, the sacraments of the Christian church. Tertullian's explanation of baptism would have been understood by an Australian bushman : "Water, when God wills, attains the sacramental power of sanctification." That is, water can acquire mana and is capable of conveying it to the one who is touched by it. Its holiness is contagious. The old Greek phrase used by Ignatius concerning the Eucharist, "the medicine of immortality," would have been partly understood at least by the Huron or Malay. Without some such medicine there would have been no medicine men. Obviously one needs the historical point of view and the scientific outlook to see these things. Therefore it is not to be wondered at that the early Christians, those most unhistor- ical and unscientific people, were long unable to define their own sacraments adequately. Augustine gets nearest a definition when he calls them the "outward and visible sign of an inward and in- visible grace" but the world had to wait for more than a thousand years of Christianity before Hugh of St. Victor added the clause which really described the operation "and are capable of convey- ing the grace of which they are the sign," In short, Augustine points out the importance of the mana and Hugh the law of homeopathy by which it works. So the electric forces still fol- low their earliest laws. Sacramental Christianity still invests the material world with mysterious forces. But while the con- ception of sacramental grace in the mind of Augustine or the analysis of Thomas Aquinas is of a kind with those of medicine men the world over, it is no longer repellent but august ; for the mana becomes nothing less than divinity itself; the barriers of this material world, which, according to Christian faith, shut in the free life of the soul, become by a beneficent paradox the very avenues by which it reaches the divine.

One can see dimly now how much of the history of mankind in general and of Europe in particular, of social taboos and state jurisprudence, of marriage and inheritance, of power of priests and kings, rests directly for an explanation upon magic. The sacred and the holy are merely our equivalents for mana and arungqtiiltha. Moreover if our surmises are correct, we have at