Page:An analysis of religious belief (1877).djvu/152

 Not only is the ecclesiastical caste required to render religious rites aceptable to the deity, but they are often endowed with the attribute of ability to modify the course of nature. Tanna, one of the Fiji group, "there are rain-makers and thunder-makers, and fly and musquito makers, and a host of other 'sacred men;'" and in another island "there is a rain-making class of priests" (N. Y., pp. 89, 428). In Christian countries all priests are rain-makers, the reading of prayers for fine or wet weather being a portion of their established duties.

Naturally, the members of a class whose functions are of this high value to the community enjoy great power, are regarded as extremely sacred, and above all, are well rewarded. First, as to the power they enjoy. This is accorded to them alike by savage tribes and by cultivated Europeans. According to Brinton, all North American tribes "appear to have been controlled" by secret societies of priests. "Withal," says the same authority, "there was no class of persons who so widely and deeply influenced the culture, and shaped the destiny of the Indian tribes, as their priests" (M. N. W., p. 285). Over the negroes of the Caribbean Islands the priests and priestesses exercised an almost unlimited dominion, being regarded with the greatest reverence. No negro would have ventured to transgress the arrangements made by a priest (G. d. M., p. 327). On the coast of Guinea there exists, or existed, an institution by which certain women became priestesses; and such women, even though slaves before, enjoyed, on receiving this dignity, a high position and even exercised absolute authority precisely in the quarter where it must have been sweetest to their minds, namely, over their husbands (D. C. G., p. 363). Writing of the Talapoins in Siam, Gervaise says, that they are exempted from all public charges; they salute nobody, while everybody prostrates himself before them; they are maintained at the public expense, and so forth (H, N. S., troisième partie, chs. 5, 6). Of the enormous power wielded by the clerical order in Europe, especially during the Middle Ages, it is unnecessary to speak. The humiliation of Theodosius by Ambrose was one of the most conspicuous, as it was one of the most beneficent, exercises of their extensive rights.

Secondly, the sanctity attached to their persons is usually