Page:EB1911 - Volume 23.djvu/91

 of the world, brother of Maāt and the giver of laws and culture to man. Thoth “the thrice-great” passed into Hermes Trismegistus whom Christian fathers could recognize, when the supremely beautiful figure of Greek theology, Apollo, had lost his dignity and ceased to be desired. Thoth was a voluminous author, and the collection of forty-two books which bore his name was a kind of primitive cyclopaedia of theology, astronomy, geography and physiology. Apollo proclaims at his birth that he will declare the counsel of Father Zeus to men. But his utterances have been only casually preserved. A special literature of oracles did indeed arise; the divine words were collected and the circumstances which produced them were recorded; and had Delphi become in fact the centre of Greece, as Plato conceived it, here might have been the nucleus of a scripture. Theories of inspiration lurk behind the rich vocabulary of Greek prophecy; the seer is, and Bakis and Musaeus give their names to sacred verses. The story of the Sibylline books in Rome, on the other hand, shows the growth of the idea of authority. They are deposited in a temple, in charge of a small sacred college; new deities and rites are introduced under their sanction; when they are accidentally destroyed, envoys are sent to the East and fresh collections are made; these are in their turn purged, the false are discarded and the true reverently preserved. By what method the books were consulted is not known; but they exhibit the idea of a sacred canon in process of formation. The theologians of India guarded their ancient hymns with the utmost care. A vast literary apparatus was devised for their protection. The famous Purusha-hymn (R.V. x. 90) already claimed a divine origin for the three Vedas, the Rik, the Sāman and the Yajush. The “triple knowledge” was sometimes derived from the “Lord of Creatures” Prajāpati—one of the unifying forms of Brahmanical theology—through Vāc or “speech.” The Veda, that is to say, had existed in the divine mind ere it was made known to men, and as such it belonged to the realm of the deathless and the infinite. The tribal poets were supposed to have “seen” the heavenly originals; elaborate arguments were devised to explain how the names of particular objects like rivers and mountains could have existed in the Eternal; while the grounds of belief in the infallibility of the sacred verses were enforced with the double weight of philosophy and tradition. Buddhism repudiated the authority of the Veda, but found it needful to supply its place; and the word of the omniscient Teacher, faithfully reported by his disciples and guaranteed by concurrent traditions, became the rule of belief for the new Order. Nor were the authors of the scriptures whose fragments are preserved in the Zend Avesta less conscious of their divine value. The ancient Gāthās, which were supposed to be the composition of Zarathustra himself, received the homage of later worshippers. Daena, the ideal personification of law and religion, is the object of praise and sacrifice. She dwells on high in the Heavenly Home, the radiant “Abode of song,” but Zarathustra summons her thence, begs for her fellowship, and prays her for righteousness of thought, speech and deed. She is produced by Vohu Mano, the “Good Thought” of Ahura, one of the six Holy Immortals; she thus belongs to the ideal creation before the earth and its inhabitants; but how the heavenly Daena was wrought by Zarathustra into written form is nowhere stated. This conception of pre-existent spiritual counterparts was not without influence on the later theology of Israel. The sacred law (Torah) was the earthly reproduction of a heavenly Torah which had no origin in time, and constituted the sum of ideal wisdom into which God looked when he would create the world.

Even Mahommedanism felt the spell of the same modes of thought. The idea of revelation was expressed by “sending down” (from nazala, to descend); that which passed from heaven to earth was a pre-existent word, eternal as God Himself. Allusions in particular passages of the Koran to the “mother of the scripture,” the invisible originals of the prophet's speech, led to the doctrine of its uncreated being. The whole history of religion presents perhaps no more singular spectacle than the mosques of Bagdad in the middle of the 9th century filled with vast crowds of twenty and thirty thousand of the faithful, assembled to discuss the dogmas of the created and the uncreated Koran.

8. Ethics and Eschalology.—The second distinguishing mark in Tiele's higher group is implied in the term “Ethical.” By this it is not intended to assert that moral ideas are wanting in the so-called “naturist” religions. Anthropologists have, it is true, taken widely different views of the relation of ethics and religion, and the stage at which an effective alliance between them might be recognized. Like all problems of origins, the question is necessarily extremely obscure, and cannot be definitely settled by historical evidence. Broadly speaking, however, it may be said that the attempt to show that certain savages are destitute of moral feeling cannot be sustained; and evidence has been already cited above (in the section on ) proving the varied and immediate effects of religion on the life of the lowest tribes. Continuous interaction marks the slow courses of advance. At a very early period in social development the rules of conduct are referred to some higher source. Thus among the tribes of south-eastern Australia described by Mr Howitt, the native rites and laws handed down from generation to generation were supposed to have been first imparted by some higher being such as Nurrundere, who made all things on the earth; or Nurelli, who created the whole country, with the rivers, trees and animals; or Daramulun, who (like Nurrundere) bestowed weapons on the men, and instituted the rites and ceremonies connected with life and death. As religion advances with improved social organization, a series of figures, partly human, partly divine, embodies the idea that the command of nature implied in the progress of the arts is due to some kind of instruction from above, and that the obligations of law are of more than human origin. The Algonquin Manibozho and Quetzalcoatl of Mexico stand for a whole group of typical personalities in North and Central America. The mysterious fish-man Oannes, who taught the primitive inhabitants of Babylonia, according to Alexander Polyhistor, has been identified with Ea, god of the deep, the source of wisdom, culture and social order. Zeus gave laws to Minos; Apollo revealed the Spartan constitution to Lycurgus; Zaleucus received the laws for the Locrians from Athena in a dream; Vishnu and Manu condescended to draw up law-books in India. The worship of ancestors has again and again gathered around it powerful and ethical influences, emphasizing the parental and filial relations, and strengthening the mutual obligations of communal life. Hirata answered by anticipation the modern reproach against Shinto, founded on the absence of any definite morality connected with it, by laying down the simple rule, “Act so that you need not be ashamed before the Kami of the unseen.” The mythological embodiments of the connexion of law in nature with the social and moral order have already been briefly noted: a few words may be said in conclusion on another product of the union of religion and ethics, viz. the doctrine of judgment after death. That this doctrine is not essential to a highly moralized religion is clear from the fact that it formed no part of the earlier Hebrew prophecy. Judgment, indeed, was an inevitable outcome of the sovereignty of Yahweh, but it would be passed upon the nation in the immediate scene of its misdoings; and even when the scope of the divine doom