Primitive religion

“ The primitive religion of the ancients was a natural growth, accepted insensibly during a state of savagery and maintained politically long after it had been repudiated by philosophy, but Christianity was offered to a world already advanced in civilization, and had to pass through a process of intellectual digestion before it could take its place as an unassailable national belief. The Church, before it stands clearly revealed in the light of history, had been inspired with the conception of a Trinity by a contemplation of the Platonic philosophy ”

“ And if he holds that "the bearing of this on the future of religion is decisive"—if, as he says, "the religion of man in the vast cycles of primitive ages was reverence for nature as influencing Man," and if, as he infers, "the religion of man in the vast cycles that are to come will be the reverence for Humanity as supported by Nature"—if, as it thus seems, primitive religion as conceived by him is a basis for what he conceives to be the religion of the future; then his conception of the religion of the future is, in so far, baseless. ”

“ In primitive societies, as the studies of a Frazer [Pg 211] or a Rivers have shown us, the whole of life is enmeshed with religion, and there is scarcely an activity of man which is not spun round with religious emotion and ritual. Very often the idea of God has not in this stage been clearly formulated; there is simply a notion of power, of mysterious influence, sometimes partly crystallized round a primitive deity. ”

“ The growth of religious ideas is environed with such intrinsic difficulties that it may never receive a perfectly satisfactory exposition. Religion deals so largely with the imaginative and emotional nature, and consequently with such uncertain elements of knowledge, that all primitive religions are [Pg 6] grotesque and to some extent unintelligible. ”

“ In the second place, even a sketch of primitive religion in general ought to presuppose in the sketcher a fairly complete knowledge of the whole subject, so that all the parts may appear, not indeed in detail, but in their proper relative proportions. Now though I have given altogether a good deal of time to the study of primitive religion, I am far from having studied it in all its branches, and I could not trust myself to give an accurate general account of it even in outline ”

“ In fact, others have shown that primitive religion does not altogether consist in mythical conceptions, but mainly in reverential actions, sacrifices, sacraments, vows, and other similar cults, which have very little to do with the atmospherical powers of nature, but rather with the social life of primitive people. ”

“ The stage of a nation's development regulates its religion. Man creates his own gods; they are powerless to change him.
As written history records only those events in human experience which belong to a comparatively recent period of man's existence, and as the primitive conceptions of a Deity lie buried beneath ages of corruption, glimpses of the earlier faiths of mankind, as has already been stated, must be looked for in the traditions, monuments, and languages of extinct races. ”

“ And if from all these researches he is able to show that the religious sentiment appeared in humanity at first under superstitious and imperfect forms—as all manifestations of physical, intellectual, and moral life were imperfect and primitive—and then, with the slow and gradual evolution of civilization, instead of being eclipsed and disappearing, rose to higher forms and attained to a reflex knowledge of itself, until it took concrete form in the Christian religion ”

“ Some nations trace back their descent to a time of utter barbarism, whence the Gods recalled them; others start from a golden age, as the primitive condition of men. [2] The latter opinion prevailed with the Hebrews, from whom the Christians have derived it. According to them, the primitive state was one of the highest felicity, from which men fell; the primitive worship, therefore, must have been the normal Religion of mankind. ”

“ The systematization of the lower religions, the reduction of their multifarious details to the few and simple ideas of primitive philosophy which form the common groundwork of them all, appeared to me an urgently needed contribution to the science of religion. ”

“ What we learn as to primitive man, on the side of his religion, we must learn in part from the psychology of the matured and civilised, the present living, thinking, feeling man in contact with his religion. Matured religion is not to be judged by the primitive, but the reverse. The real study of the history of religions, the study of the objective phenomena, from earliest to latest times, has its place. But the history of religions is perverted when it takes for fact in the life of primitive man that which never existed save in the imagination of twentieth century students. ”

“ Whether the religions of nature be regarded as the distortion of primitive traditions, or as the spontaneous creation of the religious faculties, the agreement or contrast suggested by a comparison of them with the Hebrew and Christian religions, which are preternaturally revealed, is most important as a means of discovering the universal laws of the human mind ”

“ In the long and varied course in which religion has adapted itself to new intellectual and moral conditions, one of the most marked processes has affected time-honoured religious customs, whose form has been faithfully and even servilely kept up, while their nature has often undergone transformation. ”

“ Customary observance, buttressed by the sanctions of religion, has supplied the element of stability specially necessary to primitive society. These primitive religious instincts have persisted, and continue to play their part in all developed religions, though they have been moulded by the mellowing influences of such emotions as gratitude and love. Yet these two instincts form the basis of the Church. ”

“ The vast distance which separates the last-named degenerate outgrowth of the Christian religion from pure primitive Christianity is not greater than that which separates those mediaeval alternatives from the cultured religious consciousness of the present day. ”

“ The primitive Christians, whose conceptions of a future life and of heaven and hell, the abodes of the blessed and the sinful, were far more vivid than those of their pagan predecessors, accepted and intensified these ancient ideas. ”

“ Further, when we first come to the study of primitive religions we expect a priori to find the same elements, though in a ruder form. We expect to see "The heathen in his blindness bow down to wood and stone," but the facts that actually confront us are startlingly dissimilar. ”

“ This fear we believe to be erroneous. It has its origin in the continual confusion of the true, reasonable, nature-religion and the dogmatic, mythological, church-religion. The Comparative History of Religions, an important branch of Anthropology, teaches us the manifold nature of outward form in which different peoples and epochs have, in accordance with their individual character, enveloped religious thought. It shows us that the dogmatic teachings of the church-religion itself are subject to a slow, continuous evolution. New churches and sects arise, old ones disappear ”

“ And thus, in the expression of the [48] biographer of Charles V., the barbarous nations when converted to Christianity changed the object, not the spirit, of their religious worship. Many of the ideas of the old religion were consciously tolerated by the first propagators of Christianity, who justly deemed that the new dogmas would be more readily insinuated into the rude and simple minds of their neophytes, if not too strictly uncompromising. ”

“ Such being the facts, which cannot be successfully refuted, we must believe that the Christian religion, instead of being of Divine authenticity, as popularly claimed, is purely and entirely of human origin, and that all its teachings relative to a future state are but priestly inventions, concocted for the purpose of enslaving the ignorant masses. ”

“ We have seen how alien it is to the entire spirit and teachings, both in art and literature, of the primitive church, and have traced its growth with the decline of Christianity, like a fungus on a dying tree, till it has sapped its very life, and concealed its early beauty and strength beneath deformity and decay. ”

“ Let us, then, labor to banish the wide-spread delusion believed and taught by a thousand systems of worship—Jew, Pagan and Christian—that "religion is of supernatural or divine origin," and the many ruinous errors; senseless dogmas and deplorable soul-crushing superstitions so thoroughly inwrought into the Christian system will vanish like fog before the morning sun, and be replaced by a religion which sensible, intelligent and scientific men and women can accept, and will delight to honor and practice. ”

“ And this, my brethren, is the first character by which the religion of Christians is at once distinguished from superstitions and sects. It is the most ancient religion in the world. The first men, before an impious worship was carved out of divinities of wood and of stone, worshipped the same God whom we adore, raised up altars, and offered sacrifices to him, expected from his liberality the reward of their virtue, and from his justice, the punishment of their disobedience. The history of the birth of this religion, is the history of the birth of the world itself. ”

“ Whatever ethical purity may have adorned the lives of the first converts, Christianity as an established religion was not less of a grovelling superstition than Paganism in its worst forms. The worship of martyrs, of saints, the factitious miracles wrought at their graves, the veneration of their relics and images, were but a travesty of polytheism under another name without the saving graces of the old belief. ”

“ And then these ceremonies became focalized and crystallized into tribal beliefs, and eventually these fears and faiths became personalized into gods. But in all of this religious evolution the moral element was never wholly absent. The impulse of the God within man was always potent. And these powerful influences—one human and the other divine—insured the survival of religion throughout the vicissitudes of the ages and that notwithstanding it was so often threatened with extinction by a thousand subversive tendencies and hostile antagonisms. ”

“ What, then, are these Catholic, Protestant, Mohammedan and Buddhist religions? They are not religions at all: they are merely philosophies, or systematised accounts of God, the world, and of man, which have obtained large support in earlier stages of the world's history. ”

“ The development of the system of Christian doctrine must become a necessity when Christianity meeting with pagan culture in the form of science is called upon to defend her claim to be the universal religion. ”

“ Whenever we can trace back a religion to its first beginnings, we find it free from many of the blemishes that offend us in its later phases. The founders of the ancient religions of the world, as far as we can judge, were minds of a high stamp, full of noble aspirations, yearning for truth, devoted to the welfare of their neighbours, examples of purity and unselfishness. What they desired to found upon earth was but seldom realised, and their sayings, if preserved in their original form, offer often a strange contrast to the practice of those who profess to be their disciples. ”

“ At present there are only two possibilities—either to look on quietly while the tidal wave of naturalism, getting ever more powerful from day to day, sweeps away the last vestige of religious thought, or to transfer the sinking fire of religion to the ground of Pantheism, in a religion independent of any ecclesiastical guardianship. ”

“ The conception of a limited Deity then, i.e. a Being really circumscribed in power, and not verbally only by a confinement to necessary truth, is at variance with our fundamental idea of a God; to depart from which is to retrograde from modern thought to ancient, and to go from Christianity back again to Paganism. The God of ancient religion was either not a personal Being or not an omnipotent Being; the God of modern religion is both. For, indeed, civilisation is not opposed to faith. ”

“ The part played by Christianity in the development of Western civilization and its position as chief representative of the religious interpretation of the universe makes our selection of it for study natural. To identify traditional religion with a low stage of its development, in which it is inextricably bound up with crude myth and ritualistic magic, is not a fair procedure. We must take theology at its best and place it over against science and philosophy before we can rightly judge it. ”

“ It may, therefore, happen—and this quite independently of the growth of a World-cult such as I have described, though by no means in antagonism to it—that a religious philosophy or Theosophy might develop and spread, similar to the Gnonam of the Hindus or the Gnomsis of the pre-Christian sects, which would become, first among individuals and afterwards among large bodies over the world, the religion of—or perhaps one should say the religious approach to the Third State. ”

“ But the roots of human sentiments and beliefs lie deeper than the roots of particular creeds, and are certain to survive and bud out afresh when an old creed has been superficially replaced by a new one. Everywhere pagan usages and ideas are found to modify Christian forms and doctrines, and it is so here. The primitive theory that diseases are of supernatural origin still held its ground, and the agency of the priest consequently remained needful. ”