History of Religion. Allan Menzies

Primitive Culture, chap. ii.

      BOOKS RECOMMENDED (GENERAL)

      Outlines of the History of Religion to the Spread of the Universal Religions. By Dr. C. P. Tiele. Translation. In Trübner's Oriental Series. Very condensed and in somewhat technical language; but the work of one of the greatest masters of the subject. A full Bibliography is appended to the various chapters.

      Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte, von P. D. Chantepie de la Saussaye. Freiburg, 1887. The English translation has an altered title, viz. Manual of the Science of Religion, Longmans, 1891. The Third Edition (1905) is practically a different book, and consists of studies, each by an expert, of the various religions.

      Religious Systems of the World (Sonnenschein, 1892) is a full collection of descriptions of the various religions, by persons specially acquainted with them; of very unequal merit.

      Mr. Max Müller's works cited above, also his more recent volumes of Gifford Lectures, contain a number of general discussions.

      See also the Gifford Lectures of the late Mr. Ed. Caird, and the late Prof. Tiele.

      Pfleiderer's Philosophy of Religion, 4 vols.

      Pünjer, Geschichte der christl. Religionsphilosophie, 2 vols. 1880–83.

      Rauwenhoff, Wijsbegeerde van den Godsdienst, 2 vols. 1887 (also in German).

      M. Jastrow, The Study of Religion, 1901.

      L. H. Jordan, Comparative Religion, its Origin and Growth, 1905.

      Revue de l'histoire des religions, edited by M. J. Réville.

      Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, edited by Alb. Dieterich.

      Reinach, Orpheus, Histoire Générale des Religions, 1909.

      Hastings, Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. i. A-Art, 1908.

      The New Schaff-Heizog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge has excellent articles on the various religions.

      Louis H. Jordan, Comparative Religion, 1905. An account of the progress of our study, with extensive bibliography.

      Galloway, The Principles of Religious Development, a psychological and philosophical study, 1909.

      Proceedings of the Oxford International Congress of the History of Religions, 1908. 2 vols. The addresses of the Presidents of the Sections give a record of the most recent progress in every part of our study. Of these see, for this chapter, Count Goblet d'Alviella, vol. ii. pp. 365 sqq. on the Method and Scope of the History of Religion.

      CHAPTER II

      THE BEGINNING OF RELIGION

      Origin of Civilisation.—Every inhabited country, we are assured by ethnologists, was once peopled by savages; the stone age everywhere came before the age of metals. Antecedent to every civilisation that has sprung up on the earth is this dim period, the period of the cave dwellers and afterwards of the lake dwellers. There can be no chronology nor any exact knowledge of these early men who lived by hunting, with stone weapons, animals which are now extinct. How from his earliest and most helpless state man came in various ways to help himself; how he discovered fire, how he improved his weapons and invented tools, how he learned to tame certain of the animals on which he had formerly made war, and instead of wandering about the world came to settle in one place and till the soil, and how family life came to be instituted, and the father as well as the mother to act as guardian to the children; all that is a vast history, which must be read in its own place. Immense, indeed, were the labours early man had to undergo, in wrestling his way up from a life like that of the brutes to a life in which his own distinctive nature could begin to display itself.

      It was from the savage state that civilisation was by degrees produced. The theory that man was originally civilised and humane, and that it was by a fall, by a degeneration from that earliest condition, that the state of savagery made its appearance, is now generally abandoned. There may be instances of such degeneration having taken place; but on the whole, the conviction now obtains that civilisation is the result of progressive development, and was the result man conquered for himself by his age-long struggles with his environment. That development did not take place in all lands alike. In some it proceeded faster than in others, and its advances were due oftener to propagation from without, than to unaided growth from within; as one race came in contact with another new ideas were aroused of the possibilities of life in various directions. In some lands the development has scarcely taken place at all. There remain to this day races who are judged to be still in the primitive condition. Not all savage tribes are thought to be in that condition. The bushmen of Australia, the Andaman Islanders, and others,¹ are found to be in such a state in point of habits and acquirements that they must be considered as races which have fallen from a higher position, and present instances of degeneration. But a multitude of savage tribes remain in all quarters of the globe who do not appear to have been thus enfeebled, and who are held to be still in that state in which the dwellers in all parts of the earth were before what we now call civilisation began. They are races among whom civilisation did not spring up, as it did in China or in Peru. From these races we may learn in a general way, though in this great caution is required, what the ancestors of all the civilised nations were. It confirms this conclusion that we find in every civilised nation a number of phenomena, practices, beliefs, stories, which the mental condition of the nation as we know it does not account for, which manifestly are not outgrowths of the civilisation, but relics of an older state of life, which civilisation has not entirely obliterated; and that these practices, beliefs, and stories can be exactly matched by those of the savage races. The inference is drawn that civilisation has sprung from savage life, that, as Mr. Tylor says, "the savage state represents the early condition of mankind, out of which the higher culture has gradually been developed by causes still in operation." To trace the history of civilisation, therefore, it is necessary to go back to the earliest knowledge we have of human life upon the earth, and to ask what germs and rudiments can be discovered among savages of law, of institutions, of arts and sciences. Such works as Maine's Ancient Law, Tylor's Primitive Culture, Lubbock's Origin of Civilisation, show how fruitful this method is, and what floods of light it pours on the history of society.

      ¹ Instances in Tylor, Primitive Culture, chap. ii., where the theory of degeneration is fully discussed.

      Now what is true of civilisation generally will be true also of religion, which is one of its principal elements. If every country was once inhabited by savages, then the original religion of every country must have been a religion of savages; and in the later religion there will be features which have been carried on from the earlier one. This, indeed, we must in any case expect to find. No new religion can enter on its career on a soil quite unprepared, on which no gods have been worshipped before. (That would imply that there had been races in the world without religion, on which we shall speak presently.) A new faith has always to begin by adjusting itself to that which it found in possession of the soil, and it always adopts what it can of the old system. We should expect then that the great religions of the world should exhibit features which do not belong to their own structure, but which they inherited, with or against their will, from their uncivilised predecessors. And that is the case, as we shall see afterwards, with all the great religions. They are all full of survivals of the savage state. The old religious associations cling to the face of a land and refuse to be uprooted, whatever changes take place among the gods above. Superstitious practices continue among a race long after a truth has been preached there with which they are entirely inconsistent. Stories are long told about the gods, quite out of keeping with their character in the theology of the new faith, pointing to a time when not so much was expected of a god. In Mr. Lang's Myth, Ritual, and Religion, the reader will find an admirable collection of material showing how the popular elements of an old religion survive in a new one in which they are quite out of place. There is none of