BOOK Sensuous stage of language. faded from the mind, we shall not allow old associations and prejudices to stand in the place of evidence, or suffer the discovery to interfere with or weaken moral or religious convictions with which these phrases or emblems have no inseparable connexion. The student of the history of religion can have no fear that his faith will receive a shock from which it cannot recover, if his faith is placed in Him with whom there is no variableness nor shadow of turning, and whose work human passion can neither mar nor hinder. He can walk in confidence by the side of the student of language and mythology, and be content to share his labour, if he hopes that such efforts may one day 'lay bare the world-wide foundations of the eternal kingdom of God.'1 In truth, the evidence which must guide us at the outset of the inquiry can be furnished by the science of language alone. The very earliest records to which we can assign any historical character refer to states of society which are comparatively late developements. The history of words carries us back to an age in which not a single abstract term existed, in which human speech expressed mere bodily wants and mere sensual notions, while it conveyed no idea either of morality or of religion. If every name which throughout the whole world is or has been employed as a name of the One Eternal God, the Maker and Sustainer of all things, was originally a name only for some sensible object or phenomenon, it follows that there was an age, the duration of which we cannot measure, but during which man had not yet risen to any consciousness of his relation to the great Cause of all that he saw or felt around him. If all the words which now denote the most sacred relations of kindred and affinity were at the first names conveying no such special meaning, if the words father, brother, sister, daughter, were words denoting merely the power or occupation of the persons spoken of, then there was a time during which the ideas now attached to the words had not yet been developed.2 But the sensuousness which in one of its results produced mythology could not fail to influence in whatever degree the religious growth of mankind. This 1 Max Müller, 'Semitic Monotheism,' Chips, &c., i. 378. 2 See vol. i. ch. iì. THE VITAL POWERS OF NATURE. sensuousness, inevitable in the infancy of the human race, consisted in ascribing to all physical objects the same life of which men were conscious themselves. They had every thing to learn and no experience to fall back upon, while the very impressions made upon them by the sights and sounds of the outward world were to be made the means of leading them gradually to correct these impressions and to rise beyond them to facts which they seemed to contradict. Thus side by side were growing up a vast mass of names which attributed a conscious life to the hosts of heaven, to the clouds, trees, streams and flowers, and a multitude of crude and undefined feelings, hopes, and longings which were leading them gradually to the conscious acknowledgment of One Life as the source of all the life which they saw around them.' The earliest utterances of human thought which have come down to us belong to a period comparatively modern; but even some of these, far from exhibiting this conviction clearly, express the fears and hopes of men who have not yet grasped the notion of any natural order whatever. The return of daylight might depend on the caprice of the arbitrary being whom they had watched through his brilliant but brief journey across the heaven. The sun whose death they had so often witnessed might sink down into the sea to rise again from it no more. The question eagerly asked during the hours of night betray a real anguish, and the exultation which greeted the dawn, if it appear extravagant to us, comes manifestly from men for whom nature afforded but a very slender basis for arguments from analogy. But although the feeling of confidence in a permanent order of nature was of long or slow growth, the phenomena of nature suggested other thoughts which produced their fruit more quickly. The dawns as they came round made men old, but the Dawn herself never lost her freshness, and sprang from the sea-foam as fair as when she first gladdened the eyes of man. Men might sicken and die, but the years which brought death to them could not dim the light of the sun; and this very contrast supplied, in 1 Max Müller, 'Semitic Monotheism,' Chips, &c., i. 355. 2 See vol. i. p. 41. 109 CHAP. II. BOOK II. Aryan and Mono- Professor Max Müller's words, the first intimation of beings which do not wither and decay-of immortals, of immortality." When from this thought of the immortality of other beings they awoke at length to the consciousness that man himself might be among the number of immortal creatures, the feeling at once linked itself with another which had thus far remained almost dormant. To adopt once more the words of Professor Max Müller, by the very act of the creation God had revealed himself;" but although many words might be used to denote that idea which the first breath of life, the first sight of the world, the first consciousness of existence, had for ever impressed and implanted in the human mind,' the idea of a real relation with this Unchangeable Being could be awakened in men only when they began to feel that their existence was not bounded to the span of a few score years. A twofold influence, however, was at work, and it produced substantially the same results with the Semitic as with the Aryan races. Neither could be satisfied with effects while seeking for a Cause; and the many thoughts as to the nature of this Creative Power would express themselves in many names. The Vedic gods especially resolve themselves into a mere collection of terms, all denoting at first different aspects of the same idea; and the consciousness of this fact is strikingly manifested by the long line of later interpreters. A monstrous overgrowth of unwieldy mythology has sprung up round these names, and done its deadly work on the minds of the common people; but to the more thoughtful and the more truthful, Indra and Varuna, Dyaus and Vishņu, remained mere terms to denote, however inadequately, some quality of the Divine Nature. But the Vedic Indra and Dyaus might have a hundred epithets, and alike in the East and West, as the meaning of these epithets was either in part or wholly forgotten, each name came to denote a separate being, and suggested for him a separate mythical history. Thus the Hindu sun-god Sûrya was represented among the Hellenic tribes not only by Helios and Phoibos, but by POLYTHEISM AND MONOTHEISM. 111 II. Herakles and Perseus, Theseus and Bellerophôn, Kephalos, CHAP. Endymiôn, Narkissos, Kadmos, Oidipous, Meleagros, Achilleus, Tantalos, Ixîôn, Sisyphos, and many more. The Vedic Dahanâ reappeared not only as Daphnê and Athênê, but as Eurydikê, Euryphassa, Iolê, Iokastê, Danaê, Brisêis, Aphroditê, Eurôpê, Euryganeia, with other beings, for most of whom life had less to offer of joy than of grief. But although the fortunes of these beings varied indefinitely, although some were exalted to the highest heaven and others thrust down to the nethermost hell and doomed to a fruitless toil for ever and ever, yet they were all superhuman, all beings to be thought of with fear and hatred if not with love, and some of them were among the gods who did the bidding of Zeus himself, or were even mighty enough to thwart his will. Thus these names remained no longer mere appellations denoting different aspects of the character of the same being; and from the Dyaus, Theos, and Deus, of Hindus, Greeks, and Latins, sprung the Deva, Theoi, Dii, and the plural form stereotyped the polytheism of the Aryan. world. The history of the Semitic tribes was essentially the same. The names which they had used at first simply as titles of God, underwent no process of phonetic decay like that which converted the name of the glistening ether into the Vedic Dyaus and the Greek Zeus. The Semitic epithets for the Divine Being had never been simple names for natural phenomena; they were mostly general terms, expressing the greatness, the power, and the glory of God. But though El and Baal, Moloch and Milcom, never lost their meaning, the idea which their teachers may have intended to convey by these terms was none the less overlaid and put out of sight. Each epithet now became a special name for a definite deity, and the people generally sank into a worship of many gods as effectually as any of the Aryan tribes, and clung to it more obstinately. Of the general monotheistic conviction, which M. Rénan regards as inherent in all the Semitic tribes, there is not the faintest trace. The gods of Laban are stolen by Rachel, and Jacob bargains with God in language which not only betrays a temporary want of faith,' 6 ' Max Müller, 'Semitic Monotheism,' Chips, ii. 369. BOOK Ideas and symbols of the vivify ing power in nature. but shows that the conception of God had not yet acquired that complete universality which alone deserves to be called monotheism, or belief in the One God.'1 The recognition of beings powerful enough to injure, and perhaps placable enough to benefit, the children of men, involved the necessity of a worship or cultus. They were all of them gods of life and death, of reproduction and decay, of the great mystery which forced itself upon the thoughts of men from infancy to old age. If the language of poets in general describes the phenomena of nature under metaphors suggested by the processes of reproduction and multiplication in the animal and vegetable world, the form which the idea would take among rude tribes with a merely sensuous speech is sufficiently obvious. The words in which Eschylos and Shelley speak of the marriage of the heaven and the earth do but throw a veil of poetry over an idea which might easily become coarse and repulsive, while they point unmistakeably to the crude sensuousness which adored the principle of life under the signs of the organs of reproduction in the world of animals and vegetables. The male and female powers of nature were denoted respectively by an upright and an oval emblem, and the conjunction of the two furnished at once the altar and the ashera, or grove, against which the Hebrew prophets lifted up their voice in earnest protest. It is clear that such a cultus as this would carry with it a constantly increasing danger, until the original character of the emblem should be as thoroughly disguised as the names of some of the Vedic deities when transferred to Hellenic soil. But they have never been so disguised in India as amongst the ancient Semitic tribes; 2 and in the kingdoms both of varies greatly, and the coarser develope ments of the cultus are confined to a comparatively small number. Professor Wilson says that it is unattended in Upper Egypt by any indecent or indelicate ceremonies,' (On Hindu Sects,' Asiatic Review, vol. xvii.); and Sir William Jones remarks that it seems never to have entered into the heads of the Hindu legislators and people that anything natural could be offensively obscene-a singularity which pervades all their writings, but is no proof of the depravity of their morals; hence the |