Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 26, 1915.djvu/355

 The Religious Basis of Social Uniott. 345

partnership (like the faggot of Aesop's fable), and can depend on each other's help to carry off their wives by capture. The Sisters' suitors certainly entered as very subordinate members of such a community, and had but little control of their offspring, who bore a different name and followed a different usage and a different creed.

II. We have now at last reached the great problem : where in such a State can we find religion ? We have, like Plato, stage by stage constructed our not wholly imaginary State, and the task completed we ask where we shall find, not justice as in the Republic, hnX. faith in the unseen and the rudiments of reverence and worship ?

I and 2, I think the embryo of ancestor-worship, still the most widely-spread creed and practice on the globe, is found in fear of the jealous old patriarch. We may find in very early sepulchres objects meant to pass into the here- after with the buried person ; but there is scarcely worship as yet. And this aweful respect is not found when Patriarchy is under a cloud, when the primal family absolutism has been put into commission, and the govern- ment of groups carried on by the aristocratic compromise, the oligarchy of the Elder Brethren. In this interval — an interval unbroken to the present hour among many tribes — what will be the prevailing cult ? It will, I think, be found to be something much nearer science than religion in our sense: it will have nothing to do with tribal morals, which are prescribed by usage and the Elder Brethren ; it will be directed towards the processes of Nature so far as they affect the tribal welfare ; it will be strikingly ignorant or unsuspicious of any single will or person (or even multiple wills) behind phenomenon ; it will be effective like an experiment in a laboratory, or a pilgrimage to Lourdes, ex opere operate, and without reference to the performer's motive or moral attitude ; and it will be founded upon a curious inductive system, which will often justify its dupes and rear up an imposing pseudo-science