The Inca Religion.—We give, however, at this point an example of the transition we have described, drawn from a quarter remote from the great movements of history, and in which the facts are plain and uncontested. Of the two great civilised communities of the New World, discovered by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century, Mexico presents a worship compounded of many elements, which, along with high and lofty morality and great magnificence of ritual, yet retains an extraordinary amount of cruelty and savage horror. In Peru, however, we find a state religion which superseded savage cults still remembered in the country, and from the Royal Commentaries of the Incas, written by the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega in the beginning of the seventeenth century,[1] we are able to describe the religion of Peru both before and after the Inca reformation.

[Footnote 1: Printed by the Hakluyt Society.]

"Before the Incas," this writer tells us, "each province, each nation, and each house had its own gods, different from one another, for they thought that a stranger's god could not attend to them but only their own." They worshipped all manner of deities; of these are mentioned herbs, plants, flowers, all kinds of trees, high hills, great rocks, and the chinks in them; caves, pebbles, emeralds. They also worshipped animals; the tiger, the lion, and the bear for their fierceness, and the monkey for his cunning; these they did not kill, but went down on the ground to worship them and would even suffer themselves to be devoured by them, since they regarded these animals as their own ancestors. All kinds of animals they treated in this way; there was not an animal, how filthy and vile soever, so the quaint words tell us, they did not look on as a god. Other Indians, again, worshipped things from which they derived benefit, such as great fountains and rivers; some worshipped the earth, and called it mother, because it yielded their fruits; some the sea, calling it Mamacocha; and a great number of other objects of adoration are mentioned. They sacrificed animals and maize, but also men and women, and these not only captives taken in war but also their own children, smearing the idol with the blood. (In other quarters of the globe this is a symbolic act showing that the idol and the worshippers all partake in the same life.) Some tribes were fiercer than others, and practised cannibalism more extensively. They were also well provided with sorcerers and witches.

All this the Incas altered. They were a princely family, regarding whose origin and accession to power various legends are told; the god they worshipped was the sun, and they considered and called themselves the children of the sun. Their father the sun, they said, had sent their forefathers to teach the tribes various things they very much needed to learn; to cultivate the fields, to breed flocks, to live in peace, to respect the wives and daughters of others, and to have no more than one wife. The Incas knew better, it was said, than the rest how to choose a god, and they declared that men should worship the sun, who gave light and heat and made things grow; they should be grateful for his benefits, and he would reward them if they were obedient. The Indians accordingly took the sun for their god "without father or brothers"; they considered the moon to be his sister and wife, but did not worship her. Besides this, we hear the Incas sought a supreme god, and called him "Pachacamac," that is "soul of the world." This being gave life to the world and supported it, but they did not build temples to him or offer him any sacrifice; they worshipped him in their hearts as an unknown god.

The practice of the Inca religion as described to us by several Spanish writers falls a good deal short of this doctrine. Many beings were worshipped besides the sun; a number of prayers were addressed to the Creator and the sun and thunder. Many sacred objects also were adored, such as embalmed bodies of ancestors and various idols. They practised all kinds of magic, and, worst of all, many boys and girls were offered in sacrifice, even before the Incas and on great public occasions. The reformation of the Incas is evidently not complete; if it had not been arrested by the arrival of the Spaniards it may be that the purifying agency of the new religion would have found much still to do. Enough, however, is seen to afford strong confirmation of the principle that religion gains infinitely in elevation when a national worship appears. The Incas were no doubt the heads of a tribe which had conquered others, and imposed its religion on them. The lesser conquered worships do not die out at once, but continue along with the central one. But the latter expresses the national spirit and aspirations; and, as settled life fosters the growth of intelligence and of public spirit, the central worship must more and more supersede the others, while itself casting off its superstitious and backward elements and becoming reasonable and elevating.

It will be convenient to indicate at this stage the further line of study to be followed in this volume. As it is our aim to trace, however inadequately, the growth of the religion of the world as a whole, it is necessary that we should confine ourselves to those parts of religious history which lie in the line of that growth, or which serve in a conspicuous manner to illustrate the principles according to which it has taken place. It is by no means our purpose to give an account of all the religions of the world, nor do we seek to form a complete magazine of the curious phenomena with which this vast field of study is in every part so well supplied. If we have interposed the foregoing brief account of the religion of the Incas, it is not because of its own intrinsic importance, but because it supplies within so brief a compass such an apt example of that process which occurs so often in the growth of religion, by which the unorganised rites of a multitude of clans and families give way when the nation comes into being, to the higher and better religion of the state. In the same way the great religions of which we must next speak have, no doubt, only a loose connection with the central line of the world's religious progress. No work professing to deal ever so cursorily with our subject could omit to deal with the religion of China nor with that of Egypt; yet neither of these faiths perhaps has permanently enriched the religious consciousness of mankind. The religion of Babylonia, with which each of these is connected, was also of isolated and independent growth, and is far away from us both in time and in historical connection. Like great and solitary mountains of ancient formation, each on a continent distant from ours, these faiths attract us not because we depend on them, but because they are interesting in themselves. It was out of the same jungle of primitive beliefs and rites, out of which our own religion has at length grown, that each of these lifted its head to such heights as it attained.

After disposing of these great systems we come to the developments, much later in point of time, which have led to the highest religion yet attained. And here two great races or groups of peoples have to be considered, each in its own way singularly gifted and each contributing in a distinctive manner to the growth of religion. These are the Semitic and the Indo-European families. Under each of these heads we find several well-marked religions; and the nature of the case itself points out our further procedure. Taking up first the Semitic group,—including Islam,—since this part of the subject lies at a greater distance from ourselves, we shall inquire whether there is any common element in the various religions it comprises, or, in other words, if there is a Semitic religion which may be regarded as the origin from which the Semitic religions alike sprang, and which gave them a common character; and we shall then proceed to discuss the Semitic religions each by itself. We shall then discuss the common belief of the Aryans, and go on to the religions of the more important Aryan nations. Our last chapters will deal with Christianity and will point out the nature of development which our study as a whole may have taught us to recognise in the religion of mankind.

BOOKS RECOMMENDED

On the classification of Religions see Tiele's article on "Religion" in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Ninth Edition.

Alb. Reville, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as illustrated by the Native Religions of Mexico and Peru. Hibbert Lectures, 1884.

De la Saussaye, Third Edition, pp. 5-16, gives a good conspectus of the various classifications which have been proposed.



PART II ISOLATED NATIONAL RELIGIONS



CHAPTER VII BABYLON AND ASSYRIA

The religion of Babylonia, of which that of Assyria is a late form, as the Assyrians appropriated all they could of the religion and the literature of this southern empire which they conquered, cannot be classed along with any other without some inconvenience. In point of remoteness in time it takes precedence even of the religions of China and of Egypt; like these great faiths it also is, in its earlier stage, a growth by itself in a land and people of its own, where apparently it grew up independently from rude beginnings. It is undoubtedly one of the Semitic religions; but it had a character of its own which other Semitic religions did not share, and of the simple and early Semitic religious attitude which will be set forth in another chapter it retained but little. It had an immense influence. Its ideas entered the religion of the Old Testament by several roads. Abram came to Canaan through Haran from Ur of the Chaldees; and in Canaan the religious ideas, myths, and legends of Babylon must have been well known. The discovery of this code of Hammurabi has shown that many of the laws of Moses were laws of Babylonia long before Moses. In a later period the tread of Babylonian soldiery was heard in Palestine many a time before the great captivity, in which Israel sat down and wept remembering Zion by the waters of Babylon. In Greece also we find that ideas which came from Babylon had become known, by way of Phenicia, at a very early period. Recent discoveries, however, seems to make it impossible to assign to the religion of Mesopotamia any other place than the first among the great faiths of the world. The ancient connection between Mesopotamia and Egypt, surmised till now rather than known, is coming to light, and it appears, at least, possible that the first of these countries may have to be regarded as the source of all the civilisations of antiquity. The pantheon of Egypt has striking similarities to that of Babylonia, and some of the Egyptian temples show traces of derivation from the lands of the Tigris and Euphrates. The similarities in the case of China are not so marked, but they are substantial. In Babylonia, therefore, we may be dealing not with one of three isolated religions, but with the mother of the other two. If, as Mr. Lockyer holds,[1] Egypt borrowed astronomy from Babylon in connection with temple-building, more than 5000 years B.C., the religion of Babylon must indeed be carried far into the past.

[Footnote 1: Dawn of Astronomy, 1894.]

People and Literature.—Certain parts of Babylonian religion are much ruder and more superstitious than the exalted star-worship which is its central feature, and these have been ascribed to peoples who dwelt in Babylonia before the supposed Semitic conquest, viz. the Accadians in the north and the Sumerians to the south, peoples not related to the Semites in blood or in language, but generally called Turanian, and thought to be perhaps akin to the Chinese. The cuneiform writing which remained in use for millenniums after the Semitic immigration as the sacred literary form, was supposed to have been the invention of these peoples, who had also made some progress in plastic art.

There is, however, no direct evidence of the alleged early Semitic invasion, and the Sumerian hypothesis of which it is a feature is now regarded by some with less confidence. It is based on linguistic phenomena. Hammurabi, 2250 B.C., reigned over a realm whose subjects were of different tongues, and entrusted his records to two methods of writing. The old Sumerian language, which cannot, in the opinion of the best scholars, be shown to have affinity with any language of the ancient world, came to be confined to matters of religion and magic, and was superseded by the Assyro-Babylonian, which was Semitic. But the feeble ray of the Sumerian hypothesis can be dispensed with in the light which is shining on ancient Babylonia from other quarters. For its information about that ancient land the world was formerly dependent on the scanty notices of Greek and Latin writers, but within the last half-century astonishing new sources of information have been opened up. Explorations carried on by scholars of many lands have made us acquainted with Babylonian and Assyrian temples and palaces, and with many a great royal inscription. Great libraries, made of brick tablets, have been discovered buried under the ruins of the cities, and the gradual decipherment and arrangement of this old literature is proceeding as fast as able and devoted workers can overtake it. Those who know the subject best declare that no complete history of Babylonian religion can yet be written. The texts now in our possession embody many documents of much more remote age, yet the information is as yet too fragmentary and often of too doubtful interpretation, while the proportion it bears to the whole of Babylonian life is too little known to supply a solid foundation for history. With this caution we proceed to state the results which are considered likely to prove well founded. As we saw, several features remain in the religion in later times which appear to throw light back upon its early condition, and it may be best to begin with these before describing the noble structure presented on the whole by this religion.

1. Worship of Spirits.—The Babylonians, like the Chinese, believed the world to be thickly peopled with spirits of all kinds; and saw in each movement in nature the action of a "zi" or spirit. These spirits could be to some extent controlled; though their character was not known, yet certain charms and incantations were believed to have power over them, and communication with the unseen world took, therefore, the form of magic. The earliest portions of the sacred literature consist of spells or charms believed to possess this virtue, and these were never displaced from the collection; on the contrary, new spells were written even after higher spiritual beings were known and more ethical forms of addressing them had been devised. Especially were all pains and diseases ascribed to the agency of spirits or of sorcerers and witches, their human allies, and the sick person naturally sent for an exorcist to expel the spirit which was tormenting him. Some spirits were more powerful than others, and the stronger spirit was invoked to rebuke and drive out the weaker. The spirit of heaven and the spirit of earth were adjured to conjure the plague-demon, the demon who was afflicting the eye, the heart, the head, or any other part of the body. Assertions are not wanting in the cuneiform literature that beliefs and practices of this kind formed no part of the true religion of Babylonia, and some scholars regard it as a late degeneration. The analogy of similar cases points, however, to the conclusion that magic is everywhere an early form of religion which is only overshadowed, not killed, when a great religion arises, and which tends to reappear. It may be said that there is no evidence of any break in Babylonian religion; if the Sumerians yielded to the Semites, this led to no religious revolution; the religion is Semitic from first to last.

2. Animals.—A step above this trafficking with spirits is the worship of animals, which Mr. Sayce considers to have been an early form of Babylonian religion, and to afford an explanation of various features in it. Like the gods of Egypt and those of Greece, many of the gods of Babylon have animal emblems; this appears both in the representations of them and in their legends. The winged bulls and eagle-headed men of Babylonian art represent the same rise of the gods which we know to have taken place in Egypt, from the animal to the semi-human, and then to the fully human form. An intermediate stage in Babylonia is that the god stands on the back of the animal with which presumably he was formerly identified. We have an Assyrian Dagon whose head and shoulders are covered with a fish's skin; we have gods and goddesses who are human figures with the exception of their wings; we have winged dragons; we have the great bulls with human head and wings which stood as guardian deities to ward off evil spirits at the portal of a palace. The following animals were also connected with gods: the antelope, the serpent, which came to be the embodiment of cunning and wickedness, the goat, the pig, the vulture. We thus see that the rise from zoomorphism to anthropomorphism which the Greeks afterwards carried to the highest point attainable by the resources of art, began in Babylonia.

Like all early religions, that of Babylonia is broken up into a multiplicity of local worships. There is no common system, but each place has its own god or gods and its own sacred rites. In Egypt we shall find reason to believe that this state of matters had its origin in an early totemistic arrangement of society; whether the same was the case in Babylonia or not, it is vain to speculate. Babylonian religion as we see it has risen far above the direct worship of animals. Each god comes before us in a certain local connection and with a special character, but they tend to grow like each other, and their worship is organised on the same plan. The gods of Babylonia undoubtedly belonged to different towns, and though attempts were made in later times to bring them all together in an imperial Babylonian religion, and to settle their relations to each other, these attempts led to no system which was finally accepted. The number of the recognised great gods varied, and there was always a large number of minor gods. Each god has his own early history; here as everywhere it is the case that the individual gods are earlier than the system which seeks to connect them together.

The Great Gods.—The great gods of Babylonia belong to the elements and to the heavenly bodies. When we first see them, they are not, like the gods of the western Semites, lords and masters, characters taken from human families; they are not husbands and fathers but creators and universal powers. Another mark about them is that they have originally no wives. When they come to have wives, these are simply doubles of themselves with no special character. A consort is given to the god by adding a feminine termination to his name, thus Bel receives Belit, Anu has Anat. Finally Babylonian religion is more and more directed to the heavenly bodies. It is Astral religion carried to its furthest point. This fixed the arrangement of its temples, the occupations of its priests.

We rapidly pass in review the principal Gods. One of the oldest is Ea of Eridu, a town which stood in old times at the head of the Persian Gulf. He is a god of the deep, whether it was that he was considered to have come over the water from another land, or whether he is connected with the belief which was held in Babylonia as elsewhere, that all things originally arose out of the abyss. In later forms of the legend his name appears as Oannes, and he is an amphibious being, half-fish, half-man, who rises from the deep and instructs men in arts and sciences. Works were preserved bearing his name, for he was an author. He continues, even when little direct worship is addressed to him, one of the greatest of the gods. Ana the sky, is the god of Erech on the lower Euphrates. Like the Chinese, the men of Erech regarded the sky itself as the highest god, and the maker and ruler of all things. In Babylonia, however, the notion became spiritualised more than in China; at first we hear that his dwelling became the refuge of the gods during the Deluge, but in later times he is regarded as a being quite above heaven and all created beings, and even all the gods. A third great god is Bel of Nippur, not the later Bel of Babylon, but an older one, identical with the Accadian Mullilla, the lord of the under-world. The earliest gods of this religion are those of the sea, the earth, and the sky. As they belong to different districts of the country, they can scarcely be called a trinity. A better approach to a trinity is formed by Ea of Eridu, Davkina his wife who is the earth, and the sun-god Dumuzi, their offspring. The son of Ea, also named Miri-Dugga or Merodach (Marduk), is identified with the Egyptian Osiris; they have the same symbol, each is a sun-god, and each has a sister who is also his wife, Merodach has Istar, and Osiris, Isis. In Sergul the principal deity was the fire-god, sometimes called Savul; in Cutha they worshipped Nergal the god of death, the "strong one" who had his throne beneath. Cutha was a favourite place of sepulture with the Babylonians. Rimmon was a god of wind, Matu of storms. There is a dragon Tiamat, with whom the great gods have to contend.

The sun and the moon were worshipped everywhere; each city had its own sun-god and its own moon-god. The preference generally shown by nomads for the moon, since their journeys are made by night, is kept up in early Babylonia, where the moon-god is regarded as the father of the sun-god, and as the greater being. In Ur of the Chaldees the moon was the principal deity. There were also towns such as Larsa and Sippara, where the sun was the chief god; and many of the great gods of later times were originally sun-gods. The Chaldeans, moreover, were proverbially star-watchers, and a "zigurrath" or observatory, a building of seven spheres corresponding to those of the planets as they pass through the signs of the zodiac, and like them rising up to the seat of God at the North Star, was a regular part of the later Babylonian temple. To Babylonia is due the practice of the orientation of temples; that is to say, the arrangement of the building in such a way that its principal axis shall point exactly in a desired direction. Some of the Babylonian temples were oriented so that the sun should shine to the western end of them on the day of the spring equinox when the inundation of the rivers began on which the prosperity of the country so much depended. The temple was thus an astronomical instrument of a high degree of accuracy, and the priests who directed its building and served in it when built were men of science and learning. A religion which is connected with the heavenly bodies, though it does not fully supply the needs of the lower orders and has too little energy to cope with superstition, tends to produce a priesthood who form centres of enlightenment and civilisation throughout the country. This was in the highest degree the case in Babylonia. To these old astronomers the world owes the signs of the zodiac, which were fixed not later than in the fifth millennium B.C., and in which we see how early man beheld in the nightly heavens the creatures which on earth he regarded as divine, so that he worshipped them in both regions. The institution of the Sabbath is also Babylonian; whether it was connected with the changes of the moon, or with a week of days named after the seven planets, is not certain. Seven is a sacred number in Babylonia, as we find in many a connection.

Mythology.—We come lastly, in our attempt to enumerate those parts of Babylonian religion which have entered deeply into human thought, to the myths. The heroic legends and romances are the most interesting and the best-known portions of the newly-recovered literature. We have already noticed some fragments of mythology, such as the story of the fish-god who comes up daily from the sea, the moon being the father of the sun, and the family history of Ea and Davkina, with the sun their child. The two latter are evidently inconsistent with each other. But the story about the son of Ea and Davkina has an important further development. His name is Duzu or Dumuzu, and he is the Tammuz of whom we hear in the Bible (Ezekiel viii. 14), who is adored by women raising lamentations for him. He is said to be the sun-god of spring, to whom the heat of summer is fatal, and who dies in June. It is when moisture is failing from the ground that he is bemoaned. His home is in Eden, for Eden belongs to Babylonian legend, which places it near Eridu. There grows the great world-tree which the gods love; it rises from the centre of the world, and is nourished from springs which Ea himself replenishes. It is a cedar (Yggdrasil, the ash-tree, we shall find, occupies the same position with the Northern Teutons); it is sometimes found in a highly conventional form with the figure of a cherub at each side of it, each of whom holds in his hand a fruit. In this tree scholars recognise both the tree of life and the tree of knowledge with which we are familiar. The knowledge of the priests in Babylonia was not for every one, but was jealously guarded, and kept for the initiated alone.

From Tammuz we naturally pass to Istar, one of the few goddesses of old Babylonia, and by far the most famous of them. Istar was originally the goddess of the earth, and both mother and sister of the sun-god, for we are led to believe that she is at first the same as Davkina. The great myth of the descent of Istar describes how she goes down to the kingdom of the shades to seek the waters that shall give life again to her bridegroom Tammuz. The poem in which the narrative is preserved gives a description of the "house of darkness, where they behold no light," and then tells how, at the orders of Ninkigal or Allat, queen of Hades, Istar is deprived, successively, in spite of her remonstrances, of all her ornaments, and how the plague-demon Namtar is bidden to strike her with all manner of diseases. The result of Istar's disappearance under the earth is that all love and courtship cease both among men and the lower animals, and Ea himself is appealed to, to bring to an end so unnatural a state of affairs. A messenger is sent to the lower regions to cause the release of Istar and the reascent of Tammuz. This goddess, however, is known not only from this legend; she has many forms, and passed through various fortunes. The Istar of Erech herself lures Tammuz to his destruction. In early times Istar is also the evening star, the bright companion of the moon. Her leading character, however, seems to be that of a goddess of love. Fertility depends on her; she goes under the earth to find her lover. In this character she attracted in Babylonia a worship noted for impurity, which under the name of Ashtoreth is found also in Phenicia and in Syria. There is also, however, a warlike Istar, a strict goddess served by Amazons, and capable of identification with the Greek Artemis, as the Istar of love is identified with Aphrodite.

Much more primitive than the legend of Istar are some parts of the Babylonian accounts of the creation. There are several of these accounts, some newly discovered. In one the old god Ea peoples the original chaos with a variety of strange monsters. In another the birth of the gods is narrated as well as that of the world; we find also that chaos is itself conceived as a female monster, a dragon of evil, and the god has to do battle with this power of darkness and evil, and to bring light and the habitable world up from its realm. It is certainly true that the Babylonian legends of the creation are crude and inconsistent with each other, and that the account in Genesis belongs to a much higher order of thought. The Babylonian account of the deluge and the ark is more closely parallel to the Bible narrative; the two cannot possibly be independent of each other, and there may be no impropriety in holding that the Hebrew writers were acquainted with myths of general diffusion in the world they lived in.

The State Religion.—The Babylonian and Assyrian religion of which we hear in the Bible (cf. Isa. xl.-lxvi.) is the splendid worship of mighty empires; it has forgotten its humble beginnings, and under the guidance of large priestly and learned corporations has grown much in depth and purity. Of its outward magnificence the monuments furnish ample proof. The temple of Bel-Merodach at Babylon was a wonder of the world. Being the god of the prevailing city of the empire, Merodach was the greatest of all the gods, and was reverenced and extolled as befitted the friend and patron of the greatest of monarchs. His son Nebo was a prophet and a god of wisdom. What Merodach was to Babylon, Assur was to Assyria; in fact, he was the only god peculiar to Assyria. The rule that as religion grows in outward splendour it also gains in inward strength and spirituality is strikingly exemplified in the case before us. The gods have come to be moral powers, who really care for men, not only for the king, their earthly representative, but for their worshippers in general. Merodach is praised for his mercy; he not only accompanies the king in his wars, of which the inscriptions give us so many a wearisome catalogue, but he heals the sick, he brings relief to him who is mourning for his transgressions, and he brings life out of death and receives the soul committed to his mercy to a blessed dwelling above. Perhaps we pass here somewhat beyond the early period of the religion and touch on its ultimate phase. The penitential hymns of the later literature form a strong contrast to the magical incantations, which fill so much space in the Babylonian sacred literature. The confessions they contain are not very spiritual; the supplicant bewails his sufferings rather than his sins. Indeed, he rather infers from his sufferings that he has sinned, trodden, it may be, where he ought not to have trodden, or eaten what he should not have eaten, than confesses that he deserved to suffer for sins of which he is aware. What is implored is outward redress or ease, not inward peace. The removal of outward ills is taken as forgiveness. There can be no comparison between these hymns and those of the Bible. But what they do show is the rise in Babylonia of a religion for the individual. The gods are sought not only officially by the state or for state ends, but by the individual. They are believed to have regard to individual sufferings; and the friends of a dying person believe that the gods care for and will receive his soul.

Our knowledge of the religion of these lands is too imperfect to admit of wide conclusions being drawn from it. We know what the higher religion of Babylonia was; and we also see that the higher worship never entirely prevailed in this land; the god, like Bel or Assur, who bore the character of a human over-lord, never drove out the old set of spirits, nor brought the service of them to an end. As in the case of Egypt, so here the attempts made in the direction of a pure and spiritual worship met with no ultimate success. Babylon and Assyria never came so near to Monotheism as did Egypt three millenniums before Christ. Nabonidos, the last king of Babylon, collected all the gods together in his capital, and endeavoured to organise them in a system under Merodach as their head; but this led to religious discord rather than to peace, since the minor deities vehemently resented the removal of their images from their accustomed shrines, and were understood to refuse their aid to the state on the new conditions. The religion of Babylon was too much broken up into independent local cults to admit of such a unification. The highest that was reached was that one great god was adored in one city, another in another, with some depth and spirituality. To nations which had attained a higher faith, that of Babylon appeared to be an idolatrous worship of many gods. That is a harsh judgment. This religion also had life in it and advanced from a lower to a higher stage; from a timid trafficking with spirits to a service of gods who were ideal heads of human communities, and friends of individual men. It was not a mere system, as the world has been accustomed to think, of astrology and of divination of other kinds. But when Babylon and Assyria ceased to be independent powers, and became provinces of Persia, Bel bowed down and Nebo stooped, not to rise again. The world of that day had no need of them. It had already attained in more than one country to a higher religion than that of these deities.

BOOKS RECOMMENDED

The Histories of Antiquity, viz.—

Maspero, Histoire ancienne des Peuples de l'Orient.

Duncker, The History of Antiquity, from the German, by Evelyn Abbott.

Rawlinson, The Five Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World: Chaldea, Assyria, Babylonia, Media, and Persia.

Ed. Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, 1884. The first volume embraces the History of the East to the foundation of the Persian Empire.

Schrader, Die Keilinschriften und das alte Testament, 1903.

Hilprecht, Old Babylonian Inscriptions chiefly from Nippur, 1893.

Records of the Past, 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11.

Sayce's Hibbert Lectures, 1887.

Tiele, Egyptische en Mesopotamische Godsdiensten.

Jastrow, The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, 1898. The most complete account of the whole subject.

Jastrow, "Religion of Babylonia," in Dictionary of the Bible, vol. v.

Jastrow, "On the Religion of the Semites," in Oxford Proceedings, vol. i. p. 225, sqq.

F. Jeremias in De la Saussaye, pp. 246-347.

Bezold, Niniva and Babylon, 1903.

E. H. W. Johns, The Oldest Code of Laws in the World, 1903.

"On the Code of Hammurabi." E. H. W. Johns, in Dictionary of the Bible, vol. v.



CHAPTER VIII CHINA

The Chinese have always been a world in themselves, remote from other races of men; yet they developed a civilisation which is in many respects worthy to be compared with that of India or of the West. The people who made gunpowder and paper and who printed books, long before any of these things were done in Europe, might naturally think themselves the foremost nation of the earth. Their civilisation, however, has exercised no influence on the world outside of China, nor has it advanced to the higher achievements of the human mind. As their great wall secludes them from other nations, so do their mental habits prevent them from a free interchange of ideas with foreigners. The Mongolian race, indeed, from which, like the Hungarians and the Finns, they are descended, is so different from other races in many respects that some anthropologists suppose it to have a separate origin. Phlegmatic and matter-of-fact by nature, exact and careful in practical matters, and to a high degree imitative and industrious, the Chinese are singularly devoid of imagination and indisposed to philosophy. Their monosyllabic and uninflected language, belonging to one of the earliest strata of human speech, and ill fitted to express abstract or poetical ideas, is an index to their whole nature. If an awakening, as various signs appear to indicate, is now at hand for them, no one can tell how fast it will proceed, or what the final issue of it may be.

China has at present three religions, all recognised by the state and represented in every part of the country—viz. Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. For our purpose the first of these is very much the most important, as Taoism, originally a philosophy, quickly degenerated into a system of magic, and Buddhism is imported into China, and has to be spoken of elsewhere. Confucianism, being the direct descendant of the old state religion of China, is the native growth of the mind of the nation. Like the Chinese language, the state religion belongs to a very early formation, and presents the symptoms of a development which was rapid at first but was early arrested.

History of China.—Legend goes back to very remote antiquity and tells in a shadowy way of the arrival of the Chinese from the West (which scholars are agreed in regarding as a fact), and of early potentates, patterns to all their successors, who treated the people as their children, and invented for them the arts on which life in China most depends. History proper begins about 2000 B.C., though the Chinese had the art of writing a thousand years before that. Researches, however, which are now being made by several scholars, seem likely to lead to the conclusion that China received at least the seeds of civilisation and some religious ideas from Mesopotamia. That Chinese religion resembles in some respects that of Babylonia was mentioned in the last chapter. In a work like this and in the present state of knowledge it is necessary to deal with the religion of China as an isolated one. When the history of the country opens, the character, manners, and institutions of the people are already fixed. They are already civilised and have an organised religion, though how all this came about we cannot tell. The early kings are men of piety, inventors of arts, and authors of fundamental maxims of policy; but as time went on the kings grew worse and lost the affections of their people. In the twelfth century B.C. the Chow dynasty came into power and gave China some of its best rulers, but it also soon fell off; the country broke up into a number of separate feudal principalities over which the central government lost all control, and in the sixth century Confucius is found wandering from one independent state to another. This confusion led in the third century B.C. to the displacement of the Chow by the Tsin dynasty. Shi-Hoang-Ti, fourth ruler of this line, one of the strongest rulers China ever had, assumed the title of Universal Emperor. He beat back the enemies of China beyond the frontier, began the building of the great wall, and broke down the power of the feudal rulers. It was found, however, that the feudal system still lived in the affections of the people, and as it was the religious books which mainly kept the past in veneration, the emperor ordered their destruction and enforced the edict with great rigour. The House of Han, however, which replaced that of Tsin in 206 B.C., recovered the ancient literature of the country from the hiding-places where copies of the books had been preserved, and established in accordance with them the very conservative constitution which has lasted to this day.

Sources.—The books thus condemned and thus recovered supply us with our knowledge of ancient China and of its religion. They are political rather than religious in their nature. China has no Bible, no book guarded by the ministers of religion as the basis of the system they conduct; the religious teachers of China, if there are any, are the literati, the books they preserve and study are the Classics. These are connected with the name of Confucius, who collected or edited them, and himself wrote one of them. They are not thought to be inspired, but are revered because of their immemorial antiquity. No people was ever more completely under the influence of a book, or set of books, than the Chinese. The learned class, who constitute the only nobility of China, receive their whole education from the books ascribed to Confucius; which, like other authoritative literatures, contain matter of various kinds.

The Chinese collection consists of the five Classics (King) and the four books (Shu). The former were edited by Confucius; the latter are by the disciples of that sage or by Mencius, a distinguished teacher in his school about a century after him. The five Classics are the most sacred of all. They are as follows:—

I.—1. The Yih-king, or Book of Changes. This is a divining book; it consists of a set of interpretations by princes of the twelfth century B.C., of a set of lineal figures. The system is in itself of childlike simplicity, but use and age have collected mysteries about it. It was exempted from the proscription of Shi-Hoang-Ti.

2. The Shu-king, or Book of History, contains speeches and documents of the early princes from the twenty-fourth to the eighth century B.C.

3. The Shi-king, or Book of Poetry, consists of a collection of 300 songs, selected by Confucius from a mass ten times as great. Some of these pieces are extremely old.

4. The Le ke, or Record of Rites. This book is said to have been composed by the duke of Chow in the twelfth century B.C., and is the principal source of information about the ancient state religion of China. It contains precepts not only for religious ceremonies, but also for social and domestic duties, and is the Chinaman's manual of conduct to the present day.

5. Chun Tsew, Spring and Autumn, contains the annals of the principality of Loo, of which Confucius was a native, from 721-480 B.C. They are extremely dry; and if we could understand the statement of Mencius that Confucius by writing them (for they are his own work) produced a great effect on the minds of his contemporaries, many things about Chinese religion and manners would be clearer to us than they unfortunately are.

To these five Classics is sometimes added, as a sixth, the Hsiao-king, or Book of Filial Piety, a conversation on that subject between Confucius and a disciple.

It is impossible to tell how much Confucius did for these old books. Some hold that he did not change them much, nor put into them much of his own, and that, in fact, he was himself indebted to these books for all he is reported to have taught. On the other hand, it is declared that he made the ancient books teach his own doctrine, and left out all that did not suit him; and, in confirmation of this view, the fact is pointed out that while these books as we have them teach pure Confucianism, another religion of a different spirit was growing up in China in Confucius's own day, which must have had some support in the old system. It may be that Confucius did not care to report to us all the features of the old religion, but only those of which he approved. But the information given us about that old religion is admittedly correct so far as it goes; and there is little doubt that what Confucius thought best in it, and what passed through him into the subsequent religion of China, was its most characteristic and most important part.

II.—The Classics of the second order comprise four books:—

1. The Lun Yu, or Digested Conversations of the Master; or, as Dr. Legge calls it, The Confucian Analects. It is from this book that we derive our information about the sage; it was compiled probably by the disciples of his disciples.

2. The Ta-Heo, or Great Learning, and

3. The Chung Yung, or Doctrine of the Mean, are smaller works, giving a more literary form to the doctrine of the sage.

4. The Mang-tsze contains the teachings of Mencius.

The State Religion of Ancient China.—Confucius never imagined himself to be a reformer of the religion of his country. The religion of China is in the main the same to this day[1] as it was before he appeared, and what is called Confucianism is simply that old system. That the worship of Confucius himself has been added to it does not involve any change of its structure. It is already well developed when we first see it, and what is very peculiar, it has already parted with all savage and irrational elements. There is no mythology; the universal legend of the marriage of heaven and earth is dimly recognisable, but there is no set of primitive stories about the gods. Of human sacrifice there is only one ancient instance; there are no rites with anything savage or cruel about them. Everything is proper, dignified, and well arranged. The deities are beings worthy to be worshipped, and they exact no meaningless services. There is nothing in any part of the religion to disturb the propriety of the worshipper or to suggest any doubts to his mind. In no other religion of the world do we find everything in such excellent order.

[Footnote 1: The working religion of the present day is fully described by Prof. de Groot in De la Saussaye, Lehrbuch, Third edition.]

On the other hand, it is not a highly-developed religion. Its beliefs are those of extremely early times, and represent a stage of thought at which no other national religion stood still. The organisation common to developed systems is entirely wanting; there is no idol, no priestly class, no Bible, no theology; the most important doctrines are left so vague and undetermined that scholars interpret them in opposite ways. It is a religion in which, just as in the primitive stage, outward acts are everything, the doctrine nothing, and which is not regulated by an organised code but by custom and precedent. All these marks point to a formation in very early times, and to a very early arrest of growth, before the ordinary developments of mythology and doctrine, priesthood, ritual, and sacred literature had time to take place. They also point to the operation of some powerful cause, which, when the religion had developed its main features, was able to suppress older beliefs and practices, and lead the nation to devote itself altogether to the newer faith. How this took place we can only conjecture, but certainly it could never have been done unless the new faith and the national character had fitted each other perfectly. The classical religion may, as Prof. de Groot says, have come into existence along with the classical constitution set up by the Han dynasty 2000 years ago. But it must have been ready to enter into this position.

The objects of worship in the Chinese religion arrange themselves in three classes. The Chinaman of old worshipped and his descendant of to-day worships still—

1. Heaven. 2. Spirits of various kinds, other than human. 3. The spirits of dead ancestors.

1. Heaven (Thian) is the principal Chinese deity; in strictness we must say the sole deity, for there is no family of upper gods; heaven receives all the worship that is directed aloft. It is the clear vault, the friendly ever-present and all-seeing blue that is meant, not the windy nor the rainy sky, but that which is above all agitations, and which all beings of the air or of the earth look up to and serve. It is conceived as living. It is not a separable spirit, not a power behind, that is worshipped, but heaven itself,—the living heaven of that early thought, which has not yet come to distinguish between matter and spirit,—the living heaven which is over all, knows all, orders and governs all.

To this heaven other names are given, even in the oldest writings—Ti, Ruler; or Shang-ti, Supreme Ruler. Did the Chinese conceive this ruler as identical with heaven, or as a personality dwelling in it or above it? It has been held that the two beliefs are not the same; that the Chinese of the earliest times worshipped the Supreme Ruler, i.e. the one God, Ti, and afterwards fell away from that position of pure monotheism and declined to the worship of the material object, heaven. The early Catholic missionaries argued that the Chinese Shang-ti was equivalent to the Christian "God," and signified a being other than the sky, the Supreme Power of the universe. The Chinese, however, generally denied that they made any such distinction,[2] and even declared that they could not understand it. The names Heaven and Supreme Ruler are used by them indiscriminately: one notices that Confucius does not use the personal form, but only speaks of heaven; "heaven," he says, when feeling distressed, "is destroying me." We have here, therefore, an early form of nature-worship.

[Footnote 2: Dr. Legge, while admitting that the Chinese originally worshipped the vault of heaven itself, maintains that they got past the early mode of thought which considers every natural object as animated, before the dawn of history, and became pure theists, believers in a supreme spiritual being. Confucius he considers to have held a lower religious position than his countrymen had already attained to. He also regards the worship of spirits and of ancestors as a later perversion and degradation of the original religion of one god. In these positions he is followed by Professor Giles, Oxford Proceedings, vol. i. p. 105, sqq.]

The Supreme Power directs all things, and is an ever-present governor both in the natural and in the moral sphere. These two spheres indeed are not regarded as distinct. Nature reveals in all its changes the mind of its ruler, and human conduct is regarded as an outward thing, as a phenomenon on the same plane with the movements of nature; the two are supposed to be part of one system and to act directly on each other. As Heaven both governs the weather and looks after men's actions, for "every day heaven witnesses our actions and is present in the places where we are," these two aspects of providence are closely blended and are in fact the same. Heaven makes its will known in a natural way. It is one of the most peculiar features of Chinese religion that it knows no revelation, no miracles, no divine interferences. It has a belief in destiny, Ming; every one has his Ming, but it is only known when it is accomplished. "Does Heaven plainly declare its Ming?" Confucius is asked; and he replies, "No, heaven speaks not; by the order of events its will is known, not otherwise." Man learns by the external occurrences how Heaven is disposed towards him. When there is excessive rain or long drought, this shows that the harmony between Heaven and the earth is disturbed. It belongs to the emperor to put this right. He alone is entitled to offer sacrifice to Heaven; he stands in the closest relation to Heaven, who is the ancestor of his house; and when Heaven is seen to be displeased, the emperor must restore the harmony by governing his subjects better or by sacrifices. In an extreme case, when the emperor is seen to have fallen under the displeasure of Heaven, the conclusion is drawn that he must no longer be emperor. The people then are entitled to depose him and to set up a new ruler, through whom the necessary transactions with Heaven can be carried on. The belief has always been held in China, at least theoretically, and is operative to this day, that it can be known when Heaven has rejected a ruler, and that it belongs to the people to carry out that sentence.

2. The Spirits.—The worship "of the spirits" is a primary religious duty for the Chinaman. The spirits, however, are an ill-defined set of beings; they are generally spoken of in the plural number, and sacrifice was offered to them as a body, no particular spirits being named. The spirits are connected with natural objects, every part of nature has its spirit. The sun, the moon, the five planets, clouds, rain, wind, the five great mountains, but also every smaller mountain, the rivers, each district, and a thousand other things, all have their spirits.[3] The spirits are not flitting about capriciously, but have been collected together and organised in a hierarchy, and this has loosened their connection with natural objects. They are spoken of as a set of beings who may be addressed as a body. A prince alone may sacrifice to the spirit of the earth, and to those of the mountains and rivers of his territory. But to the spirits in general all may and should pray; they assist those who pay them reverence and sacrifice to them. It will be seen that the worship of heaven and that of the spirits are kept separate. The former is the imperial worship; the emperor alone is competent to attend to it. The latter is the official worship of minor states. Nor are the two sets of deities wrought into a homogeneous system; we hear that the spirits, while subordinate to Shang-ti, are not his messengers. The surmise is not to be avoided that these two worships came originally from different circles of ideas, and have not been perfectly blended. The worship of heaven belongs to the higher nature-worship, that of the spirits to the lower; the latter is animistic, it is a worship of detached spirits, while the former is a worship of the natural object itself. The spirits are all good; there are scarcely any bad spirits in Chinese belief.

[Footnote 3: The Japanese official religion, "Shin-to" (=way of the gods, as distinguished from Butsudo, way of Buddha, i.e. Japanese Buddhism), an easy worship of numberless spirits, without sacrifices and without any moral doctrine, is allied to this branch of the religion of China; as also is the religion of Corea. Shin-to is not ancestral worship, and recognises no life after death.]

3. Ancestors.—The worship of ancestors is that which is assigned to the private individual. He does not approach Shang-ti any more than he would address the emperor on earth; his working religion is directed to his ancestors. The Chinese believed in the continuance of the soul after death, and addressed solemn invitations to it to return to the body it had forsaken. Their belief can scarcely be described as that in personal immortality; it is the continuance of the family rather than of the person that is thought of. The individual does not look forward to his own future life or allow that to influence him; there is little trace of any belief in future rewards and punishments. China has no heaven and no hell. It is the past, not the future, that influences the present; the departed members of the family are believed to be still attached to it, and to have become its tutelary spirits. In every house there is a hall of ancestors, where worship and sacrifice is offered to them, and many even of the details of this worship remind us strongly of the way in which the Romans served their family heroes. Tablets belonging to the ancestors are placed in this hall; and to these they are supposed to come when properly invoked, so as to be present with the family. At every important family event they are summoned to attend. This worship has to be rendered by husband and wife jointly, so that marriage is necessary for its performance, and an early marriage is a religious duty.

The family sacrifice, like all sacrifices in China, is of the nature of a banquet, at which the living members of the family, and the spirits who have been summoned, eat and drink together. To heighten the illusion, the grandson was sometimes dressed in the clothes of the departed head of the house and made the principal figure of the celebration—

The dead cannot in form be here, But there are those their part who bear; We lead them to the highest seat And beg that they will drink and eat: So shall our sires our service own, And deign our happiness to crown With blessings still more bright.[4]

[Footnote 4: Shi-king, II. vi. 5.]

It is not only in the family that ancestors are adored. The emperor sacrifices in a public capacity to all the ancestors of his own line, and also to all his predecessors on the throne; a magistrate to all who have occupied his office before him. Ancient China possessed an elaborate ritual, and occasions of sacrifice were frequent. Every change of season, every portent of nature, every important step either in public or in private life, required its consecration. It is in accordance with the genius of the people that the sacrifices are not of the nature of propitiation, but expressions of gratitude and devotion merely. Asceticism has no place in this religion; everything in it is bright and sensible. He who is to offer a sacrifice prepares himself by prayer and retirement to do so worthily; but beyond this reasonable measure there is no afflicting of the soul, and in the prayers belonging to the occasion self-humiliation and confession have no place, but only thanksgivings and petitions. The petitions are for worldly benefits and furtherance; the sacrifices are means of procuring these from the heavenly powers. They consist chiefly of animal victims, but fruits are also used, and with the importance of the occasion the variety and costliness of the offerings increase. Elaborate music also accompanies great sacrifices, and is thought to be very acceptable to the heavenly powers. Religion is not separated from life in China. There is no special class to take care of it; every one has to attend himself to those sacrifices which are incumbent on him; this is a natural, matter-of-course part of a man's duty. As there is no Bible, there is no religious instruction, and the doctrine is quite vague and undefined. The ritual, however, is fixed by tradition in every detail, and if a man attends to it he does his duty; religion is a set of acts properly and exactly done, the proper person sacrificing always to the proper object in the proper way.

Confucius was not a man who tried to change the religion of his country; indeed, he disliked to talk of religious subjects, and he practised reverently the religion which had long prevailed in China. His conversation was chiefly about what we should call worldly matters, and it is hard to see why the religion of China, the same after him as it had been before him, should be called by his name. What led to the connection was: (1) That he taught in a clear and simple way, as had never been done before, the theory of government and morals which lies at the root of Chinese religion, and thus did something, though unconsciously, to provide that religion with a doctrine. And (2) that he collected and edited the books which are the only literary documents the religion has, and which have formed ever since the study of the ruling classes in China. Receiving these books at his hands, they have naturally looked to him as the prophet of their faith.

His Life.—Kung-fu-tsze (i.e. Master Kong; the name was Latinised by the Jesuits) is better known to us than most other religious founders. He lived to the age of seventy-three, surrounded by admiring disciples, who remembered what they saw in him and heard from his lips; and this tradition is preserved in the Lun Yu, Digested Conversations,[5] a work compiled, as we observed, by disciples of the second generation. The supernatural element which in other cases gathered so quickly round a venerated figure, is here entirely absent; in China such growths do not take place. There may be some tendency to idealise the moral greatness of the sage, but there are also passages in which this tendency evidently has not been at work; both in its candour and in the homeliness of much that is reported, the book invites confidence as a genuine record. We see the sage as the diligence of students in the present generation enables us to see Kant or Wordsworth; we hear his opinions on a great variety of subjects; we see how he behaved on occasions of state and at his meals in private, towards princes and towards common men; we laugh at his jokes and sigh with him at his privations.

[Footnote 5: Dr. Legge, Confucian Analects.]

He was born in 551 B.C. in a good rank of society, but was brought up in poverty, and owed all his success to his own merits. The bent of his mind showed itself early; as a child he amused himself with playing at ceremonies; at thirteen, he tells us, he bent his mind to learning, the subject of his studies being history and poetry, the ceremonies and the music of the empire. He early arrived at the views he always afterwards held as to the proper way to govern a people, and he believed with all the faith of an enthusiast that a vast improvement of society would follow the adoption of his method. It was to public employment that he aspired from an early period of life; but he did not readily find it in the unquiet times in which his lot was cast. He did enjoy office for certain brief periods, and marvellous things are told of the reformation of manners which at once attended his efforts as a governor. All got their due; there was no thieving, and there was no occasion to put the penal laws in execution, for no offenders showed themselves. What was the method which was held to have had such results? In the counsels which he gave to various rulers who applied to him this is set forth. He believed the power of example to be capable of effecting all that a ruler should desire. Punishments might be dispensed with, and excessive pains need not be bestowed on the machinery of government, but a prince who has "rectified" himself will soon have his people "rectified" too. The first task of a ruler is to "rectify names"; i.e. there is good government when the prince is really a prince and the minister a minister, when the father is a real father and the son a real son. The perfect order consists of the due observance by each rank of the duties belonging to it; there is to be a well-regulated hierarchy in which each understands his function and acts it out. The people are naturally good and docile, he held, and if they are well governed they will not do wrong even though rewards be offered for it. Thus by docile respect to tradition and authority, which all men are willing to pay if properly guided towards it, the pillars of the state are established.

His Doctrine.—This is the truth which Confucius preached most earnestly. He spoke of heaven but seldom, and of the spirits he professed no certain knowledge; he declared towards the end of his life that he had not prayed for many years. He was a diligent frequenter of all religious ceremonies and a strong upholder of the old order, but his interest in these things was not speculative or mystical, but entirely practical. He regarded himself as a teacher of virtue, not of religious doctrine; his watchword was "propriety," the dutiful observance of all right and customary rules of conduct. Yet there is not wanting an ideal element in his doctrine. He enounces the theory, of which the whole of Chinese religion is the outward expression, that the universe in all its parts, in nature and in man, is an order; that that order is declared to man alike in the ordinances of outward nature, in the constitution of society with its various ranks and classes, and in the ritual of religion; and that it is the whole duty of man to know that order and to conform himself to it. The theory is one in which the state is all, the individual nothing, and in which the present is entirely crushed under the dead hand of the past, and all originality and progress condemned even before they appear. If religion has been delivered from all that is unseemly and irrational, it has also, at least to Western eyes, lost much of its interest; the enthusiasms and excitements of its early stages have departed, and no new enthusiasm has come in their place; no great god-wrought deliverance thrills the memory of posterity, no local cults excite exceptional devotion, no divine historical figure attracts to itself personal affection. Religion has cast off fear but has not yet risen to the inspiration of love. The domestic worship came nearest to this, for the other worships are cold and distant indeed; but that worship was a powerful influence for the prevention of progress. The Christian text which hallows individual daring and innovation, by bidding a man put his convictions above his father and mother, would be a shocking impiety to Chinese ears.

A temple was built to Confucius after his death and his worship was added to the state religion. The attempt made by the emperor Shi-Hoang-Ti in the third century after his death to suppress his memory and the books connected with his name, was, though conducted with great vigour, unsuccessful. The teaching of Mencius (371-288 B.C.), the most distinguished of his disciples, added no new element to that of Confucius. Two movements, however, have to be noticed, which in different ways aimed at giving something richer and deeper than Confucianism, and to which China owes the two additional religions of Taoism and Buddhism.

Taoism looks to Lao-tsze as its founder; but it has no personal founder and is composed of older elements. Lao was a philosopher who lived at the same time with Confucius, though half a century older; Confucius met him, as we hear in the Analects, and spoke of him with great respect. His work, the Tao-te-king, has been preserved, and though few profess to understand it, a general idea of his thought may be gathered from it. Lao, like Confucius, founds on the existing system; he quotes largely from older works, and there are sayings common to both the sages. Metaphysical thought, however, which with Confucius was implied rather than reasoned out, here stands in the forefront. Lao's system is a philosophy applied practically. Tao, the ruling idea of the system, from which both it and the religion which followed it are named, is variously rendered Reason, Nature, the Way; the last is the nearest, though by no means a full rendering of it. By the manifold operations attributed to it, it reminds us of the Indian Brahma, and the riddle of Lao's obscurity has been proposed to be solved by the supposition that he was dealing with a doctrine imported from India which Chinese forms of speech could but imperfectly express.[6] Tao is not personal, but something that precedes all persons, all particular beings. It was there before heaven was; all things are from it and return to it at last. It is the principle at the root and the beginning of all things, by which they move, without haste or struggle, ambition or confusion. Existing first absolute and undeveloped, it has now been expressed; men can know it, and the secret of all goodness, all success both for the individual and for the state, is to know Tao and live in it. This makes a man superior to all rules and conventions; at home with himself he is superior to the world; he does not dissipate his energies in learning a great number of outward things, but acts spontaneously from an inner impulse. In this way the philosopher looked for a return of society to simpler manners; he even imagined that men might consent to put away the material arts of which they thought so much, and content themselves with living according to wisdom and being governed by the wisest.

[Footnote 6: "Lao-Tzeu et le Brahmanisme," by E. Guimet in the Verhandlungen of the Basal Conference, 1904.]

The moral precepts of Lao are often of singular beauty and show a much deeper insight than the cold teaching of Confucius. Lao taught the golden rule: "Recompense injury," he said, "with kindness." Confucius, on being asked about this, did not agree with Lao, but declared that kindness ought to be recompensed with kindness, but injury with justice, as if private morality ought not to rise higher than public policy. "Resent it not when you are reviled," Lao teaches; and "He who overcomes others is strong; he who overcomes himself is mighty." "He who knows when he has enough is rich." "The weakest things in the world subjugate the strongest." The Book of Recompenses, which is the practical manual of Taoists and is universally read in China, sets up a high ideal of goodness, and claims to be studied with devotion and earnestness. The task of self-discipline is represented as one requiring faith and courage, the continuous efforts of a lifetime, and unceasing watchfulness. If we judge Taoism either by its philosophy or by its morals, we must assign it a high rank among the efforts which have been made to guide men in the way of wisdom. As a religion, however, it is a dismal failure, and shows how little philosophy and morals can do without a historical religious framework to support them. Taoism was not at first a religion, and was not fitted to become one, as it neither offered any sacred objects of its own for pious sentiment to cling to, nor, like Confucianism, leant upon the state system. The religion which looks to Lao as its chief figure is not based on his teaching; at most it is connected with some of his less important doctrines. It did not take a place in the world till five centuries after the philosopher's death, and its rise was due partly to the emperor named above, who was opposed to Confucius, and partly to teachers who brought forward isolated doctrines of Lao's system which admitted of a popular application. When the religion appears it is a system not of philosophy but of magic. Lao had spoken of immortality as the portion of those who lived according to Tao; under the Chin dynasty (220 B.C.) Taoism is engaged in a search for the fairy islands, where the herb of immortality is to be found; in the first century of our era the head of Taoism is devising a pill which shall renew his youth. When Buddhism enters China, in the same century Taoism borrows from it the apparatus of religion, temples, monasteries, and liturgies, and sets out on its career as a church.

It was not without reason that Buddhism was sent for, if we are truly informed, by the rulers of China, or that it spread over the country, in the first century of our era. Neither Confucianism nor Taoism is a religion, in the full sense of the term, as supplying by intercourse with higher beings an inspiration for life. The former is regulative and no more; the latter is a mere set of devices for obtaining benefits from mysterious powers. Buddhism, on the contrary, appeals, as we shall see when we consider it in connection with India, to unselfish motives, and insists on the solemn responsibilities of individual life in such a way as to raise the value of the human person. As it appeared in China it is richer than we shall find it in India; it has a god, unknown to southern Buddhism, and it has a goddess Kouan Yin, "the being who hears the cries of men," sometimes represented with a child on her knee, just like a Western Madonna. While still essentially monastic, it offers salvation and a way of life to all. To faith in Buddha the merciful one is also added a belief in the paradise in which he receives believers. Thus a popular worship is provided, which neither of the older beliefs supplied.

It remains true that China has no religion worthy of the name. The phenomenon may there be witnessed, which is seen with certain differences also in Japan, that several religions exist side by side, all of which are supported by the state and live together without rivalry, and to all of which a man may belong at the same time. This could not be the case if any of the three appealed strongly to patriotic sentiment, or gave full expression to the ideals of the nation.

BOOKS RECOMMENDED

In the Sacred Books of the East, vols. iii., xvi., xxvii., and xxviii. contain translations of Chinese Classics, by Dr. Legge. The same writer has published three convenient volumes of his own, containing: 1. The Life and Teachings of Confucius, 2. The Life and Works of Mencius, 3. The Shi-King.

Dr. Legge has also written a popular work, The Religions of China, 1880. Also The Notions of the Chinese concerning God and Spirits, 1852.

The best account of the old State Religion is that of J. H. Plath, Die Religion und der Cultus der alten Chinesen, 1862.

Reville, La Religion chinoise (1889). The third volume of his History.

R. K. Douglas, Confucianism and Taoism, 1876. S.P.C.K.

De Groot, in De la Saussaye.

De Groot, The Religious System of China, vols. i.-iv., 1892-1901. Also a small book, The Religion of the Chinese, 1910.

Beal, Buddhism in China, 1884.

Murray's Guide to Japan.

J. Edkins' Religion in China, 1878, the account of a modern missionary, may be consulted.

On Taoism, Pfizmaier, Die Loesung der Leichname und Schwerter, 1870; and Die Tao-lehre von dem wahren Menschen und den Unsterblichen, 1870. Julius Grill, Lao-tsze's Buch vom hoechsten Wesen und vom hoechsten gut. Tao-te-King, 1910. Vols. xxxix.-xl. of the S.B.E. give Taoist Texts.

Revon, Le Shintoisme, 1907.



CHAPTER IX THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT

Egypt is a land of still more ancient civilisation than China, and its civilisation is of more interest to us, since from it the nations of the West obtained in part the seeds of their arts and sciences. Even to antiquity everything Egyptian appeared venerable and mysterious, and the air of mystery is not yet removed from the country of the Nile. We have discovered the sources of the river and have learned to read the writing on Egyptian monuments; but the sphinx has other riddles than these—riddles not yet solved. Who are the Egyptians, and where did they come from? In ancient times they were thought to have descended from the interior of Africa; now the opinion gains ground that they were at a very early period connected with the ancestors of the Semitic races; their language is thought to show signs of this remote relationship. How, by whom, and when were they formed into a nation? No one can tell; they come before us four thousand years before Christ, a fully-formed nation, with an elaborately organised public service, and with a civilisation both broad and rich. And lastly, What is the religion of Egypt? What are the earliest gods of the land, and in what relation do the various gods which were worshipped in it stand to each other? That question cannot at the present time be fully answered. Even should it be proved, as it appears likely to be, that Egyptian civilisation was derived originally from Mesopotamia, much will still be dark and enigmatical. The foremost scholars in Egyptology confess that no history of Egyptian religion can as yet be written. Those who have tried to sketch it differ from each other as widely as possible, some alleging monotheism as its starting-point, and some the worship of animals. The religion also comes into view at the early period we have mentioned as a fully-formed and stately public system, whose youthful struggles, if it had any, are long past. What is most peculiar in that religion is, that it embraces elements which appear at first sight to have nothing whatever in common, nay, to be quite irreconcilable with each other. We shall do well not to attempt any construction of Egyptian religion as a whole, but to content ourselves with examining one after another the various elements, almost amounting to different religions, which are found in it side by side. We shall no doubt learn something of the relations in which they stood to each other, but it may prove that we shall find ourselves unable to adopt any of the theological theories by which Egyptian priests or Greek philosophers sought to combine them in one system.

History and Literature.—The principal thing to be remembered, in order to understand the history of ancient Egypt, is that the country was divided into a number of provinces or nomes, which, there is every reason to think, were originally independent of each other. Of these nomes there were about twenty in Upper Egypt—that is, in the long gorge of the Nile from Elephantine in the south to Memphis in the north; and about the same number in Lower Egypt—that is, in the flatter country from Memphis to the sea. King Mena or Menes, founder of the first dynasty, whose date, if he was a historical character at all, and not a mythic founder like Minos of Crete, Manu of India, or Mannus of Germany, cannot be later than 3200 B.C., is said to have united for the first time the two crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt. But though they became united under one ruler, the nomes never forgot their independence, nor did they cease to maintain their separate existence as states within the empire, each having its own army, its own ruler, its own system of taxation, its own worship. The supreme power resided now in one nome and now in another. The first two dynasties belonged to that of Abydos; the succeeding dynasties, to which the earliest monuments belong, so that Egypt here begins its real history, had their seat at Memphis. The twelfth dynasty, which is known to us, but is both preceded and followed by a gap of half a millennium in Egyptian history, made Thebes the capital. Thebes was also the seat of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, which came after the foreign domination of the shepherd kings, and under which Egypt was at the summit of its power. Ramses II. and his successors, the Pharaohs of the book of Genesis, belong to the nineteenth dynasty.

How splendid the Imperial Court of Egypt was at various periods, the monuments tell us; these palaces, temples, and tombs are in proportion to a power which considered itself to have the world at its feet, and to be the manifestation of the greatest gods. Literature is at the same high level of development with the other arts, and writing is used for every branch of the public service. This, the most ancient of the literatures of the world, is spread over the immense surfaces of ancient temples and tombs, and stored up in masses of papyrus rolls, much of which is still to be explored. Our knowledge of ancient Egypt and its religion is still in its infancy. The story of the decipherment of the various characters and of the recovery of the early language of Egypt is one of the most wonderful triumphs of scholarship. Only one remark, however, do we now make in connection with Egyptian writing, namely, that it illustrates in a singular manner the conservatism of the Egyptian people, a feature of their character which is strikingly manifested in their religion also. The ancient Egyptian did not cast away an old usage when a new one, even a very superior one, had been introduced. Long after metals had come into use, he still employed for various purposes, especially those connected with religion, implements of stone. The flint knives found in mummy-cases are connected with the work of embalming, and show the retention of an archaic usage. The same is true of the matter of writing. The earliest Egyptian writing was that which is called hieroglyphic, or picture-writing. In this system what is written down does not represent the sounds of words the writer uses, but the ideas in his mind; it is writing without words; a clumsy system we should say, and presenting the greatest possible difficulties to the reader. At a very early time, however, what is called hieratic writing was invented, in which the symbols used represent not things but sounds, though the symbols used are adapted from those of the earlier picture-writing. It is in this hieratic character that the great mass of Egyptian literature is preserved to us; but here again we find that the new system did not banish the old one from use. Especially in religious inscriptions and documents, the matter is given both in the newer writing and in the older; the piece is written twice, first in hieroglyphic, the old and sacred form, and then in hieratic, the new form, which could be easily read. In the matter of different objects of worship, too, it may perhaps be found that the same aversion to discard anything old and sacred manifests itself, the same disposition rather to carry on the old and the new together.

I. ANIMAL WORSHIP

We begin with that element in Egyptian religion which is to our eyes least rational. In the ages before and after the Christian era, when a number of Greek and Latin writers tell us about Egypt, we find that the religion of the country is described as consisting mainly in the worship of animals. This excited the wonder of these writers in no small degree. Herodotus asserts that the Egyptians counted all animals sacred, and gives a list of those which were specially worshipped. The hippopotamus, he says, is sacred at Papremis, the crocodile at Thebes; and some animals are sacred all over the country. He has much to tell of the manner in which the sacred animals are fed and tended, and of the honours paid to them at their death. Lucian says: "In Egypt the temple is a building of great size and splendour, adorned with precious stones and decorated with gold and with inscriptions; but if you go in and look for the god, you find an ape or an ibis or a goat or a cat." The same statement is made by Clement of Alexandria; and Celsus, the early Roman assailant of Christianity, speaks to the same effect. Thus the popular religion of Egypt, before and after the Christian era, had animals for its principal objects. A representative of the sacred species sat or crawled or hopped in the temple, and in that nome that animal was not eaten. In the nome in which the cat was sacred all cats were inviolable; any insult offered to a cat roused the whole population to frenzy, and one who killed a cat, even though he was a stranger in the place and unacquainted with its manners, forfeited his own life. In the next nome the cat was not sacred but some other animal; and these local differences of religion might occasion war between one nome and another. Juvenal gives in his fifteenth satire an account of a religious war of old standing between two neighbouring nomes, each of which hated and insulted the animal which was worshipped in the other. This may explain why it was impossible for the Israelites to offer sacrifice to Jehovah in Egypt. They had to go out into the wilderness, off Egyptian soil, before they could sacrifice animals Egypt held sacred.

The worship of a sacred animal in its own nome, a member of the species dwelling in the temple and the others enjoying respect and protection throughout that nome, this is the normal state of affairs. Sometimes an individual animal acquires sacredness for Egypt generally, as the bull Apis of Memphis, the bull Mnevis of Heliopolis, or the goat of Mendes. These, though originally local deities, might obtain a wider reverence if the nome they belonged to rose to greater power. Animals of every size and kind were worshipped in Egypt. Besides the large animals we have mentioned, the ape, the dog, the little shrew-mouse, each had its local sacredness; also snakes, frogs, and various kinds of fishes. The beetle (scarab) can by no means be left without mention; and a number of trees and shrubs were also sacred,[1] but, very curiously, not the palm.

[Footnote 1: A very complete list of the sacred animals and trees will be found in Wilkinson's Ancient Egyptians, vol. iii. p. 258, sqq.]

It will be observed that our account of Egyptian animal worship is drawn from very late sources and applies to a late period of the religion. The religion of the earlier ages of Egypt is of quite a different kind; the kings and priests who wrote the inscriptions of the monuments tell us nothing about animal worship. Is that because such worship did not flourish in their day? Not necessarily. Perhaps they knew it well, but were not interested in it, or did not wish to encourage it. The Egyptians certainly did not believe the worship of animals to have been a late innovation. Manetho, an Egyptian priest who wrote in the third century B.C., says that the worship of animals was introduced under the second king of the second dynasty. That is as if we should say that an old custom of which we did not know the origin was introduced into Britain in the days of King Arthur. The priests of Manetho's day wished animal worship to be considered a corruption of the original religion of their country, but they could not specify the time at which it had come in, and placed its origin in the mythical period of history. The story of Manetho therefore goes to prove that the origin of animal worship is anterior to written records.

But we have other evidence to the same effect. The earliest representations of the deities of Egypt on the monuments testify in a way which can scarcely be mistaken that these great beings had originally some connection with members of the animal kingdom. The great gods of Egypt are designated on the monuments in three ways. Their ultimate form is human, the god is a man or woman, and as the human figures of all the deities are drawn after one conventional male and one conventional female pattern, a symbol is added to the head to show which god or goddess is meant. Hathor is a woman with a cow's horns on her head, Seb has a duck on his head, and so on. But an earlier form of the written symbols of the deities is that which represents them partly in human and partly in animal form. Horus appears as a man with the head of a hawk, Hathor as a woman with the head and horns of a cow, Bast is a woman with the head of a cat, Osiris has the head of a bull or of an ibis, Chnum of a ram, Amon has the head now of a ram now of a hawk. Deities also occur with human bodies and the heads of mythical animals such as the phoenix. But along with these semi-human, semi-animal figures there are found still simpler symbols for the deities; they are drawn as animals. It is only about the twelfth dynasty that the change to the higher form takes place, but even after the step was made of representing the gods as half-human, the older pictures of them were not discarded, but placed side by side with the new ones. Thus we find on the same stone two representations of Horus, one of which gives him as a man with a hawk's head, while the other makes him simply a hawk; and similar double representations of the other gods occur. If the gods of Egypt were thus conceived and represented in the earliest times, then the animal worship described by the Greek and Roman writers was not the invention of a late age of decadence, but had its roots at least far back in the past. The early gods of Egypt were animals, whatever else, whatever more they were. It may be that the animal worship of the later and weaker Egyptian periods was a revival, such as takes place in weak periods, of a style of worship which in earlier centuries had to a large extent disappeared in favour of a more spiritual faith.[2] Of this only an Egyptologist can judge, but at any rate animal worship was not a new thing in Egypt, but a very old thing.

[Footnote 2: This is held by Le Page Renouf, in his Hibbert Lectures, On the Origin and Growth of Religion, as Illustrated by the Religion of Ancient Egypt.]

Theories Accounting for Animal Worship.—What did this worship mean? and how are we to account for it? The Egyptians themselves, and the ancient writers who turned their attention to Egypt, accounted for it by a variety of theories; and various theories are still held on the subject. We can only enumerate the principal ones. (1) The beasts were worshipped for their qualities, as is said to have been the case in Peru before the Incas (chapter vi.); each was reverenced for that divine excellence or virtue which appeared to be manifestly resident in it. Thus the dog was worshipped for his watchfulness and faithfulness; the hawk for its darting flight through the upper air, like the flashing of the sunlight or of the sun-god himself; the cow as a great kind mother; the beetle for that wonderful procedure in the reproduction of his kind, in which he so strikingly brings life out of decay. (2) The beasts are not worshipped themselves; they are only the emblems of the deities with whom they are connected, and it is the deity who is worshipped, not the animal. This may be quite true of later practice, but is by no means a satisfactory explanation of its origin; for how was it arranged, and who was it that ordained at first, that the jackal should be the emblem of Anubis, the cat of Bast, the crocodile of Sebak, and so on? (3) Various mythological and quasi-historical accounts of the origin of the practice are given, such as that men long ago chose different animals for their standards in war, or that some early king, wishing to keep his subjects disunited, ordered that each nome should serve a different animal. It is also told as a story of early times that the gods when they walked on earth assumed the forms of various animals; thus the gods are still in the animals. The gods hid in the beasts in order to be near men and see how they did. But men found them out and worshipped them in the disguise they had assumed. (4) The gods cannot be present in the world and cannot be satisfactorily worshipped unless they have bodies to dwell in—that is involved in Egyptian psychology; and as the gods would be too much alike if they all occupied human bodies, they chose the bodies of different animals.