CHAPTER II.

STEPS IN THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION.

THE most remarkable thing yet discovered about this planet is the fact that human beings exist upon it in large numbers, scattered almost everywhere over its surface, who pay homage to super-terrestrial powers. But this fact, remarkable as it is, is only a portion of the truth. For the most searching and unprejudiced investigation has failed to reveal any time in human history when it was otherwise. However ignorant and forlorn man may have been in the past, we have no evidence that he has ever been so low down in the scale of being that he did not look upward with some degree of reverence and awe to higher powers.

Not many years ago this fact of the universal prevalence of religion among men was seriously called in question by no less weighty writers than Sir John Lubbock and Herbert Spencer. They quoted at length from the reports of certain travellers and missionaries among the Eskimos of North Greenland, the Hottentots of South Africa, and the Indians of Lower California, in support of their position; and they stoutly contended that in these documents we have proof positive that there are communities now in existence that have no religion at all. This challenge lead to a careful and thorough study of the status of these tribes by competent anthropologists, and in every case an extensive mythology was discovered among them, together with

elaborate religious rites. A false idea of the meaning and scope of religion, a short stay in the country, or a lack of knowledge of the native language, had been the cause of the mistaken judgment. Probably no scholar of repute to-day would hesitate to accept the statement of Prof. D. G. Brinton in his work on The Religions of Primitive Peoples (p. 30) that "there has not been a single tribe, no matter how rude, known in history or visited by travellers, which has been shown to be destitute of religion under some form."

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The reason for this historical fact is a psychological one, and has never been more clearly or forcibly expressed than by Dr. Edward Caird. Man," he asserts (The Evolution of Religion, vol. i., p. 77), " by the very constitution of his mind, has three ways of thinking open to him he can look outwards upon the world around him; he can look inwards upon the self within him, and he can look upwards to the God above him." And he very appropriately adds, "none of these possibilities can remain utterly unrealized."

For the fact is that man is a self-conscious being. And inasmuch as he is endowed with some degree of reason and will, he cannot stand still and passively gaze at the objects about him as though he were a mere brute. He must at least exert himself enough to form some kind of a conception of the powers around and above him, and put forth some degree of energy to place himself in harmonious relations with them. But it should not at all surprise us if at the outset of his career as a religious being, he shows the same confusion of ideas about the objects he worships as he does about all the other matters that come within the sphere of his experience. On the contrary, we should naturally expect to find him growing and developing

in his religious ideas as he grows and develops in all others.

As a matter of fact, this is actually the case, and it will be our present purpose to trace out in a general way some of the principal steps that he has taken as he has advanced from lower to higher conceptions on this subject in the course of history.

It is now generally agreed by careful students of anthropology that the most primitive form of all religion is best characterized by the word Spiritism. This is the naïve and unreflective belief that most objects in this world, especially those that are capable of motion, contain an unseen being, which, for the lack of a better term, we will call a demon, or spirit; that these spirits have superhuman powers and can affect for good or ill everything that concerns the ongoings of nature and the lives and happiness of man. In this stage of development human beings attribute all their pleasant experiences to a friendly demon, and all their disagreeable ones to just the opposite source. Hence they make use of every means in their power to win the favor of the good spirits, and ward off the envy and wrath of the bad.

The reason for this state of things is not hard to find. For when the primitive man first begins to give form to his religion, he is himself the only being that he knows anything about that possesses the power of spontaneous action. He cannot help attributing the same power to all the objects with which he in any way comes in contact. He acts just as every little child acts in a similar condition. Any object that constantly gives a baby pleasure it pats and caresses with affection. The one from which it gets a hard pinch or knock it wants to pound and kick with all its power. It spon

taneously assigns to the object the same sensations and feelings and will as it is itself conscious of. Its experience is so limited and crude that it does not know enough to do otherwise. So it is with primitive man. To him every other is another, and he attributes to that other all of his own powers. In his opinion the world about and above him is made up of a vague, indefinite host of superhuman demons or spirits, and the form of his religion is determined by that fact.

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Another thing that confirmed the primitive man in the belief that he was surrounded by a world of supersensuous beings was his experience in dreams; when he had developed far enough to remember his dreams with any vividness, he always thought of them as real experiences. The beings that visited him in his sleep were as genuine realities and as truly to be dealt with as any that he came in contact with when awake. fact, he finds that he can often do things in dreams that he cannot do when awake, and that he frequently communes with beings that he has no knowledge of when awake. The Kamtchatkans and Eskimos, we are told, determine what they will do when awake to a great extent by their dreams; for they regard the knowledge obtained in this way as far superior to that gained through the senses. Lucretius, however, goes too far when he asserts that "the dreams of men peopled the heaven with gods." Many of the lower animals are vivid dreamers, but they show no signs of having any religion. Still, dreams in all ages have often been regarded with superstitious reverence, and were undoubtedly an element in determining the character of the primitive religion of mankind.

It has come down to us from the Latin poet Petronius that "fear first made the gods." As a complete

statement of the origin of religion, it is contrary to the history and nature of man. The primary religious influence is not fear, but confidence and awe. The spirit of many early religions was quite the opposite of fear. "Probably the first of all public rites of worship," says a high authority (Brinton, The Religions of Primitive Peoples, p. 181), "was one of joyousness, to wit, the invitation to the god to be present and to partake of the repast." So Prof. Frank Granger testifies in his work on the Worship of the Romans. No word of mourning was allowed at their religious celebrations, and usually they consisted in large part of theatrical performances, horse-races, dances, and games for the entertainment of their gods. Dr. Robertson Smith tells us in his Religion of the Semites (p. 260) that the early Semitic ceremonies were "predominantly joyous," and it was often this element in their worship that led them to indulge in the grossest excesses. Many other modern students of the subject would bear witness to the presence of joy and confidence in primitive religions.

Yet it cannot be denied but that fear early came to be one of their most important elements. For just as with the little child, the primitive man was often disappointed in his confidence. As his experience widened and the ills of life multiplied, he began to doubt the friendly character of the spirits. He soon came to the conviction that some only were favorable to him. The rest were to be feared. And as fear once aroused feeds upon everything within its grasp and grows with extraordinary rapidity, the uncertainty as to what the attitude of the spirits would be toward him naturally caused the primitive man to spend the most of his energy in devising ways to appease their wrath.