We have already seen that the study of literary monuments is a wholly different matter from the acquisition of a language for practical use. With us the Latin and Greek languages form parts of a liberal education; the one because the basis of European civilisation is Latin, the other because the mightiest monuments of human thought are Greek. Few, however, of those who study these languages in their youth ever have occasion to use them for communication. They are taught and cultivated because man does not live by bread alone. There is no reason why any living national language should not survive in its nation in the same way as Latin, or in the world in the same way as Greek. Some theoretic knowledge of it will always be desirable in order that later generations may learn whence they came; and if it have produced monuments worthy of immortality, they will be immortal. But the desirability of preserving languages for these purposes, or for the purposes of those who investigate forms and roots, does not affect the question whether it is desirable that the world should continue or should cease to be a Babel. Reverence and affection, qualities which go to make up patriotism, may always be displayed in preserving and adorning; they need not be displayed in employing. Economy and efficiency should govern the selection of instruments for employment; and they point to the ultimate adoption of one of the three great languages of Western civilisation as the language of mankind. Such an arrangement need interfere with no national glories, no religious isolation, though the tendency of the immediate future is for religions, like seas, to join the regions they divide. Its effect would be only the beneficent one-facilitation of intercourse and economy of energy.

The unification of language within great areas has probably been more often brought about by voluntary obedience to these principles than by actual compulsion. Preparation for the ultimate object must necessarily be slow; the world must be made bilingual before it can be made unilingual; greater uniformity must be obtained in the matter of the second language, which is destined ultimately to supersede the first except in one linguistic area. The waste of energy arising from want of uniformity in this matter is notorious; thus the Encyclopædia of Islam has to be issued in three languages, when two should be ample, and one sufficient. But when once man has become more generally bilingual, when there is a recognised language for international and cosmopolitan communication of all kinds, the way towards unification of language will at least have been indicated.

[Paper submitted in English.]

RELIGION AS A

CONSOLIDATING AND

SEPARATING INFLUENCE

By T. W. RHYS DAVIDS, Ph.D., LL.D., D.Sc., Professor of Comparative Religion in the University of Manchester; and Mrs. RHYS DAVIDS,

Hon. Special Lecturer on Indian Philosophy in the University of Manchester.

THE more one thinks about this subject the more complicated and difficult it appears to be. To treat it adequately it would be necessary to take all cases in the history of the world of one race brought into contact with another, and to consider, in each case, the part played by religion in the resulting effect. A comparison of the different results in the different cases would then open up the way to certain qualified conclusions which would not fail to be both interesting and instructive. This is precisely one of the problems to which the young science of Comparative Religion hopes eventually to be able to give attention. It is also one of the numerous social and religious problems to which the scientific method has not yet been applied. The facts have not yet been collected. We have vague generalisations drawn from single instances. We have suggestive studies on one or two of the best known cases. But no attempt has yet been made to deal with the question as a whole.

A single case, though useless as the basis of any general conclusion, may be useful to illustrate some of the difficulties involved, some of the points that will have to be determined before any such general conclusion can be formulated.

When a horde of splendid barbarians who had accepted Mohamet's doctrine of death to the infidels, burst upon the civilised states of Asia, they were no doubt inspired, in the fury of their onslaught, by what they would have called their religion. To each state in turn they offered the terrible alternative of conversion, tribute, or the sword. The amazingly swift and successful spread of Mohammedanism, from the time it started on its career as a militant missionary movement, engulfing in three or four centuries the half of three continents, is a matter of modern history. It seems to vindicate religion as, at the same time, a social consolidator and social disintegrator without parallel. What other motive, unless it were the driving consensus of hunger, could have availed so to stir and urge the different sections of the Semitic race hither and thither under the common banner of one Prophet,

athirst to fling the world on its knees before the throne of the one God? From this present-time perspective, the movement reads like a frenzy for human consolidation, working by way of an equally frenzied disintegrating machinery. When we contemplate the loyalty, among many millions, of one man to another as servants of the Prophet, in the wake of that mighty wave of war, it is the consolidating power of religion that impresses us. When we consider the outrageous barbarity of the mind that says: "Because X has told me what to believe, I am going to kill you, unless you say X was right," we are overwhelmed with the baneful cleavage wrecking the progress in human concord and wrought in the name of religion.

Nor can it be generally claimed for militant propagandists, whether of Islam, or of the Christian Church, warring against heretics, that their dominant motive was altruistic or ethical. Personal salvation for the individual rather than the good of the attacked, is put forward as the one thing needful and the exceeding great reward. Founders and reformers in all religions reveal the great heart that yearns to gather the human brood together in love and concord. But the fierce missioner more often appeals to individual interest. And this makes men act in concert rather along the parallel lines of individualism than along the converging lines of solidarity and mutual service. The questions: "What shall I do to be saved?" and "What shall I do to be of service?" may both be accounted as religious, but only the latter makes essentially and entirely for solidarity. The former question has at times found its solution in a life of solitude and withdrawal from sharing in the common lot.

In both of these extreme types, therefore, the propagandist with sword in hand, and the apparently misanthropical recluse— we seem to see religion manifesting itself as a disintegrator among the factors that tend to bring mankind into closer mutual intercourse.

But is it after all accurate, in connection with Jehads and Crusades and persecutions and inquisitions, to call the motive and spring of these, religion? Is not religion possibly a pretext employed to veil the real motives? Consider the elements engaged in any so-called religious war on either side. Never has any one of them approached the spiritual plane of the one host or the other in the Holy War dreamt of by our John Bunyan-the celestial armies of the Lord of hosts, and the battalions of evil spirits bent on the spiritual ruin of mankind and the reconquest of heaven. It needs a child's simple faith to people the camps of Crusaders or Covenanters with hearts burning with the white purity and

single-mindedness of a Joan of Arc. It is as impossible to imagine the first Christians going forth sword in hand to slay unbelievers as it is to picture a Buddhist, first or last, taking up arms against his fellow-creatures. "Put up again thy sword into the sheath," said Jesus to his first Crusader. "If My kingdom were of this world, then would My servants fight." Nor can the militant Christian justly infer from the words: "I came not to send peace but a sword," that it was a Christian's duty to be he who should draw the sword. Unmodified, unqualified for early Christians, as for all Buddhists, is St. James's answer to his own question: "Whence come wars and fightings among you? Come they not hence, even of your lusts that war in your members? Ye lust and have not; ye kill and desire to have. Ye fight and war . . . because ye ask not. Ye ask and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume upon your lusts."

"That worldly motives," writes Mr. Haines in his Islam as a Missionary Religion, "played a large part in the conversion, not only of the Arabs but of the other nations that were conquered and converted by the Saracens, cannot be denied, and the Arab apologist dwells at some length upon the fact." When the Arabs of the harvestless desert tasted the delicacies of civilisation and revelled in the luxurious palaces of Chosroes, "By Allah,” said they in their wonder and delight, "even if we cared not to fight for the cause of God, yet we could not but wish to contend for and enjoy these, leaving distress and hunger henceforth to others." Desire for gain, from the bare need of necessaries that parted the Abrams from the Lots in so many folk-migrations up to the quest of treasure that drove the Spaniards over the seas and against the Aztecs, with the cry (O irony of history!) of Sant' IagoSt. James, their own denouncer-on their tongues, has waved on its hosts with the banner of religious zeal.

Race-aversion and race-pride is another cause of cleavage between man and man that finds in religious zeal and orthodox aggression a convenient outlet. Surviving as a fossil even in Buddhism, the very gospel of mutual toleration and amity, where the term "Ariya" has come to mean, not race-complacency but ethical excellence, hate of the alien as alien and not only as infidel, appears too obviously in religious wars to need exemplifying. And the enmity may become intensified when the alien is the embodiment of successful rivalry, or of radically different social institutions. When the Christian, sheathing the sword, prays for all Jews, Turks, infidels and heretics, he confesses those as most needing escape from damnation who are not only aliens, but who are or were the embodiments of success in business on the

one hand and, on the other, of aggressive restlessness and Asiatic institutions. The Spaniard might live side by side with the Moslem; the Frank and the Teuton could not. And further, where there has been aggression in the name of religion within national borders, the anger of orthodoxy may always be traced at least in part to motives due to enmity of a political, social, and economic nature.

The terse and trenchant summary of St. James, which we quote, has so thrust us on to two of the three great roots of man's miseries preached by Buddhism, greed and enmity, that we find ourselves in face of the remaining root or cause, and do not hesitate to bring it forward. If with Buddhist doctrine we class the yearning for rebirth in heaven under the general motive of greed or desire of gain, and if we then eliminate from all aggressive and inquisitorial measures, carried out under the sanction of religion, the greed and the enmity therein finding expression, we shall not greatly err in attributing the residual impulse to moha or unintelligence. It was over a Jerusalem that, with unintelligent, uncomprehending orthodoxy, persecuted the messengers of a new and purer word that Jesus wept. "If thou hadst known," hadst understood, hadst discerned, "the things that belong to thy peace! But now they are hid from thine eyes." That rulers and statesmen may discern in the rallying and concentrating attending a war the best occasion for effecting political unity is conceivable. But it is impossible to conceive any mind that has really grasped the spirit of an ethical religion, of a creed confessing a benevolent deity, to loose the dogs of war upon his fellow-men, or to coerce belief by prison or the stake. The stupidity behind "man's inhumanity to man" is perhaps the most tragic thing about it.

Once more: we have alluded to the apparently disintegrating effect of religion in the case of the recluse, driving him into an antisocial career of solitary living. But neither is the mind of monachistic temperament so simple as to act solely by one motive, religious or other. We must first eliminate all the Christian Jeromes and the Buddhist Makākassapas, who adopt a retreat at intervals as a spiritual rest cure in the intervals of missionary labours, or again as an opportunity for intellectual production. These are only cases of men separating from their fellows, the better to work for universal amity. Nor must we confuse monachism with monasticism. Within cloistered precincts, the wider intercourse of the world is usually renounced in favour of the closer sodality of co-religionists. There remains the thorough-paced lifelong recluse. And here again, while not denying him religious ardour, we discern other motives beneath the religious pretext, or, at best, side by side with

F