Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 22.djvu/488

 produces the priests, while in Spain the priests produce ignorance.

Henry Thomas Buckle holds that religions are influenced by the climate and topography of each country, and by the character of the inhabitants. "Barbarous creeds," says he, "are the result rather than the cause of a primitive stage of intellectual development. Superstition is merely the concomitant of the evils it seems to produce." The fallacy of the conclusion arises from the deficient specification of the premises; the logician overlooks the important difference between natural and factitious creeds; between local superstitions, produced by a process of natural development, like the customs and the language of a nation, and epidemic superstitions, engendered in the brain of a crazed visionary, and propagated by force and fanaticism. The former bear the marks of various national characteristics, the latter impress their own characteristics on each conquered nation. Natural superstitions reflected the poetical genius of the ancient Greeks and the warlike spirit of the Spanish Celts, but the national spirit of both Greece and Spain was crushed out by the dogmas of anti-naturalism. There are local superstitions that can not be exported; the myths of Brahmanism can not be separated from the physical geography of their East Indian habitat, while the sagas of the frost-giants and fur-clad hunter-gods could originate only in a frigid latitude. The Hindoo sticks to his rice, the Icelander to his whale-blubber. But poisons are more cosmopolitan: whisky and pessimism find votaries in every clime. The oldest creeds are the most harmless ones, for the superstitions of a primitive people are founded on natural impressions, which are not apt to mislead us to any dangerous degree. "What harm could there be in the fancy of the Arcadian shepherd who heard a spirit-voice in the answering echo of his mountains, and ascribed the sudden stampede of his flock to the trick of a frolicsome faun? Bread-and-honey offerings to the fairies did not bankrupt the Hibernian peasant. Nearly all children of nature recognized the benevolent purpose in the gifts of the great All-Mother; the gods of antiquity were mostly helpful and beautiful spirits, while the nature-hating creed of the middle ages peopled the world with legions of hideous demons. The first May-night, when Hertha awakens the slumbering wood-spirits, became the Walpurgis Nacht, with its hellish revival-meetings. The satyrs became mountain-devils; St. Irenseus intimates that Jupiter Olympius was the disguised arch-fiend in person, the chief of evil spirits—nay, Ritter Tannhäuser does not hesitate to denounce the Goddess of Beauty to her face: "Frau Venus, schöne Gattin mein, Ihr seid eine Teufelinne" ("My lady, ye are a female devil"). The pantheon of the Mediterranean nations became a pandemonium, and in all Christian countries of mediaeval Europe this devil-mania raged with a uniformity of violence and persistence that completely refutes Buckle's theory. From the fourth to the end of the fifteenth century fanaticism was clearly