Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/451

 SOCIAL CONTROL 437

natural object." 1 This hypothesis does justice " to the intimate relation between religion and the fundamental structure of society which is so characteristic of the ancient world."" In the passage to larger groups "the totem first becomes an animal god, and then comes to be thought of as the divine ancestor more or less completely anthropomorphic." 3

Whatever the primitive tie may have been when the curtain rises on the Aryan race the bond is not now blood but worship. Sympathy and obligation have passed from the plane of physical relationship to the mystic relationship existing between the co-worshipers of the same god. " The tie of blood did not of itself alone constitute the family ; the tie of the common wor- ship had to be added." 4 "The foundation of relationship was not birth ; it was worship." * " The notion of identity does not hold with the Hindoos, Greeks, and Latins the place it did with the Semites, but the bond is still an ideal one. The dead are the cement that unites men. To have the same gods, to be watched, 1 loved, and protected by the same deities, to be destined to join the same unseen company at death these created fellowship. In the family natural affection reinforced by this ideal bond becomes piety ; in the state the feeling for fellow citizens becomes a narrow and intense patriotism.

From an outward relation to ancestral deities religion was destined to return to the old basis of brotherhood. But now, so much has society enlarged, the assertion of physical kinship is impracticable. It was the mission of the religion of Jesus to* proclaim the union of all men in the bonds of an ideal brother- hood.

The social contribution of Jesus is bound up with his doctrine of man. According to him man is both body and soul the former lying in the chain of heredity and affording a faint race kinship useless for practical purposes; the latter descending directly from God, the common source of all souls. The body is but dust and will perish, but the soul is immortal, indestruc-

' A'insAif an! Marriagt, p. 186. * Ibid., p. 230. * Ibid., p. 72.

p. 223. 4 DB COULANGKS, The Ancient City, p. 64.