Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/384

Rh 366 RELIGIONS preach lies hidden and lives unspoken in the minds and hearts of their generation. It is clear then, that on both sides of the line of demarcation between the two categories of religions there are individuals at work, and that on both sides there is growth. The only remaining difference is, that on this side there is consciousness, on that side there is not. But this too cannot serve us. Much in the growth of the so-called race religions was unconscious and therefore anonymous and forgotten ; much, however, was not so. We know of many changes for better or worse in national religions, either reforms or reactions, made with full consciousness, because intentionally ; and we know the names of the kings or tyrants or other individuals who made them. Who knows if the same was not the case when these religions were born if what now seems to be the collective product of the wisdom of the community was not simply the product of a tyrant's, a mighty chief- tain's bon plaisir, or of a renowned magician's influence 1 Finally, if by " founder of a religion " is meant he whom the professors of that religion revere as a heaven-born messenger of the truth or as the greatest of prophets, or adore as the son of God, the incarnation of the highest, then what Prof. Whitney says they all did, namely, " give shape and coherence to a body of doctrines of specially moral aspect," does not apply to the most of them. The new body of doctrines in its coherence was never shaped by them, but by the leaders of the community to which their preaching gave rise. We call them founders of a new religion, not because they always intended to found one, but because, perhaps involuntarily, they laid the foundations of it in the new and pregnant principles they revealed to the world by their word and life. Still, whatever we may have to criticize in Prof. Whitney's proposition, there is indeed no more marked distinction among religions than the one he makes between what he calls race religions and religions proceeding from an individual founder, and no other than this should be the basis of a morphological classification. For between those two great categories or orders to one or other of which all known religions belong and every religion must belong there is a difference not only of degree but of an essential kind, a difference of principle, the one great all- important difference. The principle of the one category is nature, that of the other ethics. In the nature religions the supreme gods are the mighty powers of nature, be they demons, spirits, or man-like beings, and ever so highly exalted. There are great mutual differences between these religions, though they belong to the same order, e.g., a great difference between the Finnic Ukko and the Norse Odin, between the thunder- god of the Brazilian aborigines and the Vedic Indra or the Olympian Zeus, but it is only a difference of degree; fundamentally they are the same. Nobody denies that one nature religion stands on a much higher level than another. Not only are they either uncon- sciously and by the drift of public opinion or consciously and intentionally altered, enriched, combined with foreign modes of worship, but in some of them a constant and remarkable progress is also to be noticed. Gods are more and more anthropomorphized, rites humanized. For they are not by any means inaccessible to the influence of moral progress. From an early period moral ideas are com- bined with religious doctrines, and the old mythology is modified by them. Ethical attributes are ascribed to the gods, especially to the highest. Nay, ethical as well as intellectual abstractions are personified and worshipped as divine beings. But as a rule this happens only in the most advanced stages of nature worship ; and, moreover, these ethical personifications are simply incorporated in the old system, and not only not distinguished from the nature f gods, but even subordinated to them. If some individuals philosophers, sages, prophets have risen to the conscious- ness that the moral ought to have predominance over the natural, yet nature religion, though strongly mixed with ethical elements, does not recognize this, and those who are called to represent and defend it abhor such inde- pendent thinkers and persecute them as dangerous enemies to the faith of 'the fathers. Nature religions cannot do otherwise, at least if they do not choose to die at once. They can for a long time bear the introduction let us say, infiltration of moral, as well as aesthetic, scientific, and philosophical notions into their mythology; they suffer from it, indeed, and this is instinctively felt by the headstrong defenders of the pure old tradition ; but they are unable to shut them out, and if they did so they would be left behind and lose their hold on the minds and the hearts of the leading classes among more civilized nations. So they are obliged to let them in, were it only for self-preservation. But the reform must not exceed certain limits. If the ethical elements acquire the upper hand, so that they become the predominating principle, then the old forms break in twain by the too heavy burden of new ideas, and the old rites become obsolete as being useless. If the majority has at last outgrown the traditional worship and mythology if it comes to the conclusion, which was already the conviction of philosophers, that the old numina are only nomina, Zeus, Hera, Hestia only names for the sky, the aether, the fire, 1 to which moral attributes can be ascribed only in a tropical sense then nature religion inevitably dies of inanition. No political power, no mighty priesthood, no poetry, no mysticism like that of the Neo-Platonists, no romanticism like that of Julian, not even an attempt to imitate the organization and the rites of an ethical religion, can save it any longer from utter decay. When this culminating point has been reached, the way is prepared for the preaching of an ethical religious doctrine. Ethical religions do not exclude the old naturistic elements altogether, but subordinate them to the ethical principle and lend them something of an ethical tinge, that they may be more in accordance with the now prevailing system. The old nature-gods, at least the most important among them, survive, and, though first neglected and thrown into the background by the new ideal or abstract divine beings, come again to the front, but only as serving spirits, ministers, angels (dyyeAoi, yazatas, <fcc), or even saints, as all nature now stands under the control of one supernatural ruler in whom the supremacy of moral ethical religions are just the reverse of that which characterizes the naturistic. Nature religions are polydse- monistic or polytheistic ; under favourable circumstances they may rise at best to monolatry. Ethical religions, on the other hand, though not all of them strictly monotheistic or pantheistic, all tend to monotheism and are at least monarchic. In nature religions, though they are not exempt from the control of individuals, and even have in part received from them their particular shape or been reformed by them, the ethical or national aspect prevails over the individual, spontaneous growth over conscious speculation, imagination over reflexion. Ethical religions on the contrary are communities brought together, not by the common belief in national traditions, but by the common belief in a doctrine of salvation, and organized with the aim of maintaining, fostering, propagating, and 1 This conclusion as such is utterly false. The gods are no mere nomina. They are not the natural phenomena themselves, but spirits, lords, ruling them. The fact is that their worshippers at last become conscious of the naturistic basis of their religion and then reject it.
 * law is personified. Now the prominent characteristics of