Crawford Howell Toy

“ The most important elements that religion (though only in its highest form) has introduced into ethics are a grandiose conception of the basis and nature of the moral life, and a tone of tenderness in the attitude toward the deity and toward men. The moral code it regards as the will of God, conscience as the voice of God, morality as obedience to God, all activity as a coworking with God. ”

“ He is the first to express clearly the conception of a sacred nation, isolated by its religion from all others, the guardian of divine law and the abode of divine majesty. This kingdom of God he conceives of as moral: Yahweh is to put his own spirit into the people, [4] creating in them a disposition to obey his commandments, which are moral as well as ritual (xxxvi. 26, 27) . The conception of a sacred nation controlled the whole succeeding Jewish development; if it was narrow in its exclusive regard for Israel, its intensity saved the Jewish religion to the world. ”

“ Religion, even when it employs force, recognizes the protective function of the deity; magic is without such acknowledgment, without emotion or worship. While it has, on one side, a profounder conception of cosmic force than appears in early religion, it is, on the social side, vastly inferior to the latter, to which it has necessarily yielded in the course of human progress. Nevertheless, if religion in the broadest sense includes all means of bringing man into helpful relations with the supernatural world, then magic is a form of religion. ”

“ Proverbs does not offer the good of society as an aim of action, though it takes for granted that good conduct will promote the happiness of all. Assuming human freedom it at the same time assumes that the ills of life may be overcome by a wise employment of man's resources, and it silently regards universal happiness on earth as the goal of human development. Its religious scheme is the simplest form of theism; religion is reverence for God and obedience to His laws; Though the sages doubtless recognized the temple-cult as of divine appointment and obligatory, they lay no stress upon it ”

“ The analysis of the external world and of man's body and mind, the discovery of natural laws, the history of the internal and external careers of the human race—this is the affair of science and philosophy; rules of conduct, individual and communal, grow up through men's association with one another in society, their basis being certain primary instincts of self-assertion and sympathy; art is the product of the universal sense of beauty. All these lines of growth stand side by side and coalesce in unitary human life. ”

“ In all the Wisdom books virtue is conceived of as conterminous with knowledge. Salvation is attained not by believing but by the perception of what is right; wisdom is resident in the soul and identical with the thought of man. Yet, with this adoption of the Greek point of view, the tone and spirit of this literature remain Hebrew.
The writings of the sages are all anonymous. No single man appears as creator of the tendency of thought they represent ”

“ Divination has in common with magic the assumption of the unity of the world and its control by law, and the search for divine activity in the facts of life. But the two differ essentially in their aims. Divination seeks to learn the divine will in order to be guided; magic studies divine action in order to imitate it and accomplish divine results. Divination is an inquirer, and its virtue is obedience; magic is an investigator, and its virtue is achievement. Both are self-seeking, but divination is the more reverent and allies itself more easily with religion. ”

“ In general it is the simple homely virtues that are enjoined on men in Proverbs—there is no mention of courage, fortitude, intellectual truthfulness, and no recognition of beauty as an element of life; the ethical type is Semitic, not Hellenic, and the sages emphasize only those qualities that seemed to them to be most effective in the struggle of life; their insistence on the practical, not the heroic, side of character is perhaps in part the consequence of the position of the Jewish people at that time, as also the silence respecting international ethics belongs to the thought of the times. ”

“ A similar view appears in the fact that a hero is sometimes of mixed parentage—his father or his mother is divine: a local god, standing in close cultic connection with a greater deity, is easily made into a son of the latter. In general, in the popular worship there seems to be no distinction between old heroes and gods. Where such a hero stood in close relations with a community—if, for example, as was sometimes the case, he was the patron or tutelary divinity of a family, or a mythical ancestor—there was doubtless a peculiar tenderness in the feeling for him. ”

“ Pantheism has never commended itself to the masses of men. It is definitely theistic, but the view that the divine power is visible only in phenomena and is to be identified practically with the world is one that men in general find difficult to comprehend. The demand is for a deity with whom one may enter into personal relations—the simple conception of a god who dwells apart satisfies the religious instincts of the majority of men. The ethical questions arising from pantheism seem to them perplexing: how can man be morally responsible when it is the deity who thinks and acts in him? ”

“ In the Iliad Zeus is sometimes ignorant of the future and has to employ the scales of destiny, and in Hesiod appear the three Fates who control the lives of men independently of the gods. The conception of a controlling fate may be regarded as an effort to reach an absolutely unitary view of the world. Above all the divine powers that regulate affairs, after the manner of the government by a king with his attendant chieftains and officers, there is a sense of a dim and undefined power of unknown origin, mysterious, absolute, universal. ”

“ Science and religion are coeval in man's history, and both are independently continuous and progressive. At first science is in the background because most objects, since they are believed to be alive and active, are naturally supposed by man to affect him purposely; it grows slowly, keeping pace with observation, and constantly abstracting phenomena from the domain of religion.1 Religion is man's attitude toward the universe regarded as a social and ethical force; it is the sense of social solidarity with objects regarded as Powers, and the institution of social relations with them. ”

“ The organization of divination resembles that of magic in several respects. It comes to have its special functionaries, into whose hands all its authority falls. The divinatory power (like the magical) comes to a man sometimes as a gift of nature (that is, of a god) or in some mysterious external way, sometimes as a result of a course of training in which the significance of the various signs is learned. It is sometimes a property of a clan or a family and descends from father to son, always, however, under the condition of instruction of the young by the old. ”

“ The disciples of philosophers formed schools, and the adherents of each school constituted a group the members of which were united one with another by the bond of a common intellectual aim and a common conception of life and of the world; and there was also a scientific union between the various groups, the fundamental methods of investigation and lines of thought being the same everywhere. But the object of thought was the discovery of truth by human reason, not the quest of salvation by worship of the divine. ”

“ Mysterious potencies in the shape of souls, spirits, gods, or mana are held to preside over and control all affairs—birth, sickness, death, hate and love, hunting and war, sowing and reaping. There is no dogma except belief in this extrahuman influence—no conception of moral effort as based on and sanctioned by a definite moral ideal, no struggle of the sort that we call spiritual. Religion consists of a body of practices whose authority rests on precedent ”

“ The study of processes has gone hand in hand with the creation of divine beings who are supposed to manifest themselves in the processes. The great spectacle of nature's productivity has been especially recognizable in the vegetable world and in the world of man; in both of these life has been perpetually unfolding itself under men's eyes as a mysterious process, which, by virtue of its mysteriousness, has become religious material and has entered into systems of religious worship. ”

“ The domestication of animals leads men to regard them simply as material for the maintenance of life—the mystery that once attached to them vanishes; they are considered not as man's equals or superiors but as his servants. The same result follows when they are used as aids in tilling the soil or in transportation. Agricultural peoples also have generally some knowledge of the arts of life and a somewhat settled civil and political organization, and these tend to separate them from the lower animals and to diminish or destroy their sense of kinship with them. ”

“ The height of the sky above the earth, the persistence with which the stars seem to look down on men, the invariability of their courses, the mysteriousness of their origin would naturally lead to the belief that they had some control over human affairs. ”

“ Religion may adopt some philosophical explanation—as that evil is only failure to reach the good, or only the lower step to which we look back from a greater height, or an inevitable accompaniment of a scheme of life characterized by struggle and intended to recognize the freedom of the will and to develop moral autonomy—but, from its own resources it can only say that it is a thing inexplicable by man, belonging to a divine plan that the devout soul accepts as right because God has ordained it. ”

“ Man is bound by his constitution to inquire into the nature of things, to seek for the facts of the world, including the human soul. This search is made by both religion and science, but their procedures are somewhat different. Religion demands only the fact of an ultimate moral ground of the world; science observes all phenomena and endeavors to connect and organize them by a thread of natural causation or invariable sequence; religion looks behind phenomena to what it regards as its source. ”

“ It was natural to early man to think of the sun as a ball of fire which had somehow been thrown up into the sky, and of the moon as associated with the sun as sister or wife or husband, and of the stars as children of these two. For creative agents early man had to look to the beings about him, particularly to beasts, birds, and insects. The process of creation was simple—the story usually amounts merely to saying that such and such a beast or other being made this or that object; and there is very rarely, if ever, a conception of an absolute beginning ”

“ All important members of the human body have been regarded as to a greater or less extent sacred, their importance depending on their subservience to man's needs. The head of an enemy gives the slayer wisdom and strength; an oath sworn by the head or beard of one's father is peculiarly binding; the heart, when eaten, imparts power; a solemn oath may be sworn by the sexual organs. In no case does the sacredness of an object necessarily involve its worship; whether or not it shall receive a true cult depends on general social considerations. ”

“ We might naturally suppose that human beings, as well as animals, plants, and inanimate things, would be objects of religious reverence to undeveloped communities; men, it might seem, would be thought worthier objects of worship than beasts, plants, and stones. In fact, the cult of human beings has been and is widespread, but in this cult the savage mind makes a sharp distinction between the living and the dead. Living men are tangible and intelligible, affected with human frailties, and therefore offer less food for the imagination than beasts ”

“ The Jews and the Persians went a step further, and conceived of a final general judgment, a final winding-up of human history, and a permanent reconstruction of the world on a basis largely moral, though tinged with local religious elements—a grandiose idea that has maintained itself up to the present time, embodying the conviction that the outcome of life depends on character, and that ethical retribution is the essence of the world. ”