Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/387

Rh RELIGIONS 369 even are continuously fading away, while the former now embrace many millions of adherents belonging to various nations and races, and ever go on increasing more or less rapidly, this cannot be due to some fortuitous or external circumstances only, but must have its principal cause in the very nature of each sort of religions. 4. When we call the one particularistic the others universalistic (not universal), the one national the other human, when we describe the one as bound to special doctrines and rites, the others, though equally embodying themselves in doctrines and rites wherever they were organized into churches or state religions, as nevertheless really free from them and starting from principles and maxims, we possibly use words apt to be misunderstood and perhaps wanting some qualification, but the meaning of them on the whole is sufficiently clear. In calling nomistic religions, like Judaism and Mazdaism, particular- istic or national, we do not mean to say that they are exclusive in character and that they have not tried to spread beyond the boundaries of the race and the nation to which they belonged originally. They have done so indeed ; they hoped to extend their dominion, but they succeeded only where they could impose the nationality or the civilization with which they had grown together, like the Chinese in Corea and Japan, or the Brahmans in several parts of India ; and it is known that the proselytes of Judaism always ranked below the born sons of Abraham. Now Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity were neither national nor parh'cularistic. All of them were the repre- sentatives of ideas surpassing so to say the national horizon ; all of them had in view, not the special religious wants of the nation, but more general aspirations of the human heart and mind. Two of them, therefore, were rejected, after a shorter or longer struggle, by the peoples to which their founders belonged by birth ; and it is a well-known fact that Mohammedanism, though founded by an Arab, took its fundamental ideas from Judaism and Christianity, and that not the Arabs, but foreign nations, especially the Persians, raised it to the high position which it would not have occupied in the world without them. The national form of the Buddhistic idea was Jainism, that of the Christian idea Ebionitism, and perhaps the Wahhabites may be considered as the national reformers of Mohammedanism ; and it is only natural that none of these sects found adherents except among the peoples in the midst of which they arose. Nor were Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity particularistic. Bud- dhism " looks for the man ; the miseries of existence beset all alike, and its law is a law of grace for all." So too in its way does Islam ; in the beginning it spreads by con- quest, but the faithful of every nationality, whether converted by the force of arms or by the preaching of missionaries, acquire the same rights and dignity as the Arabs. The universalism of Christianity needs no proof. Here, however, the difference begins. We class these three religions under one head, because they resemble one another in so many respects, and because they differ from the other religious communities founded by individuals precisely in that in which they are mutually alike. But we are far from placing them on the same level. Islam, e.g., is not original, not a ripe fruit, but rather a wild offshoot of Judaism and Christianity. Buddhism, though the most widely spread, has never been victorious except where it had to contend with religions standing on no very high degree of development. For a short time it had a footing in Persian countries, but there its influence was neither deep nor durable, and in China it was not even able to overcome Confucianism and Taoism ; it seems to have been driven from India by Brahmanism, without being actually persecuted. Both Islam and Buddhism, if not national, are only relatively universalistic, and show the one-sidedness, the one of the Semitic, the other of the Aryan race. The former represents an important religious idea the absolute sovereignty of the one God, towards whom man, being nothing himself, has only one duty, that of tacit obedience ; it exalts the divine, not com- bining it with, but opposing it to, the human, which it despises, and therefore neglects the -development of ethics. Buddhism on the contrary neglects the divine, preaches the final salvation of man from the miseries of existence through the power of his own self-renunciation ; and therefore, as it is atheistic in its origin, it very soon becomes infected by the most fantastic mythology and the most childish superstitions. If religion really is the synthesis of dependence and liberty, we might say that Islam represents the former, Buddhism the latter element only, while Christianity does full justice to both of them. Christianity, the pure and unalloyed at least, has fused dependence and liberty, the divine and the human, religion and ethics into an indivisible unity. 5. There are still some other points of difference. Thus, to mention one point only, Mohammedanism in its external features is little better than an extended Judaism. Spread over many countries, adopted by various nations differing in culture, speech, and race, nevertheless it has its holy language, its unvarying rites, its central sanctuary round which the pilgrims from every part of the Mohammedan world assemble every year. Not so with Buddhism and Christianity. If Christian crusaders tried to reconquer their Holy Land from the infidels, and in fact possessed it for a time, if mediaeval Buddhist pilgrims desired to see, and some Christian pilgrims even now visit, the places where the cradle of their faiths once stood, all this makes no longer an integral part of their worship, which is not necessarily bound to place or time. The divisions of Buddhism and Christianity are mutually much more in- dependent than those of Mohammedanism. Still, though in this respect Buddhism comes nearer to Christianity, this alone preaches a worship in spirit and in truth ; and in that which Rothe called its greatest excellence, in its variety, its changeableness, its power of adapting itself to the religious wants of various generations, peoples, and individuals, in a word, in its elasticity, which is the natural result of its purely spiritual character, Christianity ranks incommensurably high above both its rivals. 1 But we cannot pursue this matter any further. We now give the following sketch of a morphological classification of religions : I. NATURE RELIGIONS. (a) Polydajmonistic Magical Religions under the control of Animism. To this class belong the religions of the so-called savages or uncivilized peoples, but they are only degraded remnants of what they once must have been. (b) Purified or organized Magical Religions. Therianthropic Polytheism. 1. Unorganized. Japanese Kanii-no-madsu. The non-Aryan (Dravidian) reli- gions of India, principally in the Deccan. Religion of the Finns and Ehsts. The old Arabic religions. Old Pelasgic religion. Old Italiote religions. Etruscan religion before its ad- mixture with Greek elements (?) The old Slavonic religions. 2. Organized. The semi-civilized religions of America : Maya, Natchez, Toltecs-Aztecs, Muyscas, Incas in Peru. The ancient religion of the Chinese empire. Ancient Babylonian (Chaldaean) religion. Religion of Egypt. 1 To prevent misconstruction, it is perhaps not superfluous to state that we are giving here neither a confession of faith nor an apology, but that we have here to treat Christianity simply as a subject of comparative study, from a scientific, not from a religious point of view. XX. - 47