CHAPTER VI
SACRED PRODUCTS
In the intimate connection of religion with life all primitive interests are placed under its sanction. A large portion of time is occupied with its ceremonials. The fortunes of the tribe are bound up with it. To the bounty of its powers they owe abundant food and safety or success in war. Beneath its protection the newly born enter the world, and to its care the elders are committed when they die. Its holy persons rule in their midst; its holy places are all round about them; its sacred objects are in their homes. It is not surprising, therefore, that all the higher possessions of the tribe, its arts and crafts, its traditions, its customs and laws, its stories of the gods and their dealings with each other or with man, should be ascribed to the same origin. Where individuality is hampered at every turn by time-honoured conventions, and personal initiative is imperfectly developed and timidly confined within the narrowest limits, all higher intellectual products, command over nature, inventions, poetry and song, the usages of the social order, and the rituals for serving the gods, carry with them a secret force, a mysterious authority, which passes the bounds of human wisdom, and has been imparted from some higher source. Each man is dimly conscious that his single wit could not have compassed these things; he does not observe the long processes and imperceptible stages of advance; he accepts the theory offered to him by those who should know best, and looks back to the days when kindly powers took in hand the instruction of men.
Thus at the present day many of the Australian tribes whose condition has probably changed little since the date of the oldest civilisations of antiquity, regard their scanty institutions as ordained by beings above. Ask the Narrinyeri why they adhere to any custom, the answer is that Nurrundere commanded it. Baiame and Bunjil laid down the marriage laws for their respective tribes; Bunjil, moreover, taught the Kulin the arts of life; and Daramulun gave the Yuin laws which the old people handed down from generation to generation.
The elaborate cultures of Babylonia and Egypt claimed similar origins. In the vast prehistoric period before the Flood the people round the lower Euphrates had lived without rule or order, like the beasts of the field, till a wondrous Fish-Man, whom the Greek historian called Cannes, appeared out of the Persian Gulf with wisdom from the sea. He taught them arts and laws, and wrote concerning the generation of mankind, their different ways of life, and their civil polity. It was no other than Ea, god of the encircling Deep, the source of all. Historic inscriptions told of his "books," which may have included ancient oracles, and which certainly laid down the duties of a king. So the famous code of Hammurabi (about 1950 B.C.), recently discovered at Susa (1901), was handed to him, as the tablet shows, by the great Sun-god, Shamash.
The Egyptian priests, perhaps as late as the great Nineteenth Dynasty, before the days of Moses, threw into definite shape the vague traditions of immemorial antiquity, when men had lived devouring one another, ignorant how to till the ground. Osiris (p. [119]) taught the art of tillage, the use of the plough and hoe, how to grow wheat and barley, and the culture of the vine; and Isis added the domestic arts of making bread and weaving linen. Osiris, moreover, appointed the offerings to the gods, regulated the ceremonies, composed the texts and melodies of the hymns. And among his successors was Thoth of Hermopolis (p. [8]), who introduced astronomy and divination, medicine, arithmetic, and geometry, and whose "books," embracing a kind of religious encyclopædia, were known to the Christian teacher, Clement of Alexandria, in the second century of our era.
So Zeus gave laws to Minos in Crete, and Apollo revealed the Spartan constitution to Lycurgus; Numa, the traditional founder of the Roman ceremonial law, received instruction from the nymph Egeria. The shepherd slave, Zaleucus (whom Eusebius placed about 660 B.C.), taught the Locrians what Athena had first taught him, and prefaced his laws by enjoining them to revere the gods as the real causes of all things fair and good in life, and keep their hearts pure from all evil, inasmuch as the gods do not take pleasure in the sacrifices of the wicked, but in the righteous and fair conduct of the good.
From the New World come a series of similar figures. Mr. Curtin claims to show that the vast area of the American continent is pervaded by one system of thought incalculably old. In the central group of the most sacred personages is the Earth with Sky and Sun conceived sometimes as identical sometimes as distinct. The Earth-maiden on whom the Sun has gazed, becomes a mother, and gives birth to a great hero. He bestows on men all gifts that support existence, and it is through him that the race lives and prospers. To the Algonkins he was Michabo or Manibozho, the "Great Light," who imparted vision, author of wisdom, arts, and institutions. Among the Toltecs at Tulla he was Quetzalcoatl, virgin-born, founder of civilisation, who organised worship without human or animal sacrifices, and endured no war. The Miztecs called him Votan, prince and legislator of his people, representative of a higher wisdom, so that he rose to be the mediator between earth and heaven. In the plains of Begota the white-bearded Bohica appeared to the Mozca Indians, taught them how to sow and build, formed them into communities, contrived an outlet for the waters of their great lake, and, having settled the government and the ritual, retired into ascetic penance for two thousand years. Out of the depths of Lake Titicaca in Peru there rose one day the son and daughter of the sun and moon, Manco Capac and Mama Ogllo, sent by their father in compassion for men's wretched plight. They taught the ignorant folk agriculture, the chief trades, the art of building cities, aqueducts, and roads, and Mama Ogllo showed the women how to spin and weave. Then when all was in order, and overseers were appointed to see that each one did his duty, they went back to the skies.
These stories all belong to the class known as myths. They are not accounts of what actually happened, they are the work of religious imagination operating on a particular group of facts, and endeavouring to explain them. The scope of mythology, whatever may be its particular origins, is of the widest compass. It embraces the whole field of nature and life. It first came into modern view through the study of classical antiquity in Greece and Rome. The discovery of Sanskrit and the investigation of its literature, especially of the Vedic hymns, concentrated the attention of scholars for a time, pre-eminently under the genius of Max Müller, on the relations of myth to language, and the resolution of various deities of India and Greece into the phenomena of dawn and sunshine, of the thunderstorm or the moon.
But it was gradually found necessary to abandon one after another of the philological identifications which had at one time been proposed with confidence. New aspects of mythology demanded consideration. It was not only concerned with the incidents and powers of nature, or with the various relations of the gods. It appeared also in the field of ritual. It often contained antique secrets of the meaning of religious performance. It was the key to the dramatised representations of the sacred dance, the ceremonials on which depended the welfare of the tribe. And in proportion as action acquired a larger psychological recognition in shaping the character of religion, and belief receded into the background, the significance of the development of myths was changed.
As religion, however, became more self-conscious, the intellectual element in it gained more force and energy, and the thinkers of the priestly schools endeavoured to bring the claims of different deities into some sort of order, and regulate the hierarchy of heaven. But they were often confronted with ancient elements of savagery which could be imperfectly harmonised with the more refined ideas of a progressive culture. Thus already in Homer, Zeus, as supreme God, bears one significant epithet; he is mêtieta, full of mêtis or counsel. The word is of doubtful derivation, but with the strong tendency of Greek imagination to turn abstract ideas into persons, Mêtis is presented by Hesiod (next in literary succession to Homer) as the daughter of Ocean, the Hellenic equivalent of the Babylonian Deep, source of all being even for the gods. Greek thought was not yet ripe for the ontological conception of wisdom or intelligence as inherent in the divine nature, so the union of Thought with Zeus is represented mythologically as a marriage, and Mêtis becomes the bride of the great "king of gods and men." The result is conceived in truly savage fashion. In order to possess her in the most intimate manner, and embody her in his own person, Zeus suddenly swallows her. Mythology, of course, has to provide a reason; she would bear a son who would overthrow him. The poet (or perhaps his editor), desirous of correcting this brutal selfishness, suggests a further plea; the goddess should be his perpetual monitor, and warn him inwardly of good and evil. The myth is being directly moralised. Whatever, therefore, may be the origins of myth, whether in connection with tribal tradition, in the interpretation of the incidents of nature—as when a Siberian described to Baron von Wrangell the occultation of one of Jupiter's moons by saying that the blue star had swallowed another very small star and soon after vomited it up again—or in endeavours to picture the characters and relations of the gods, the beginnings of the world, the birth of man, the entry of evil, sin, and death, or the condition of those who have already passed away, the myth becomes the reflex of the culture in the midst of which it rises. It is the depository of human experience, of man's criticism of his own life. And in its representations of a distant age when gods visibly consorted with men, and deigned to instruct them in the conditions of social welfare, mythology is the direct product of religion.
When the gods have withdrawn from human fellowship, and no longer choose their brides from the dwellers upon earth, or even vouchsafe to appear among them in various forms for temporary help or promise of blessing, the communications from heaven do not cease altogether. The Vedic poet might challenge the existence of Indra, the fool might say in his heart, "There is no God"; but the Powers above never left themselves without a witness. The negro going out of his hut one morning strikes his foot against a peculiarly shaped stone. "Art thou there?" he inquires, and recognises the presence of a guardian and helper. The Samoan watches the behaviour of a spinning cocoa-nut, or the flight of a bird to right or left. The Central Asiatic notes the cracks on a tortoise's shell, much as a modern palmist traces the lines in a human hand. The liver is selected as the special seat of the prophetic faculty, and Babylonian and Etruscan developed a common diagnosis of its marks. The Celt divined by the water of wells, or the smoke and flames of ascending fires, and slew his prisoners that the secrets of destiny might be discovered in their entrails. China and Rome made divination the basis of elaborate state systems. Rome produced a literature of Augury, with books of regulations and minutes of procedure, while Plato commended it as "the art of fellowship between gods and men," and the philosophy of the Stoics justified it on the ground of a providential harmony between nature and man, so that divine guidance was vouchsafed to human need. Did not clouds and stars move by Heaven's great ordinance?
The lot took the responsibility of decision out of the hands of man, and vested it in the presiding deity. There is always a mystery in chance, which could be interpreted as the will of God. The oath implied that the heavenly Powers could be at any moment summoned to attest man's veracity; and the vow must be fulfilled, though it might cost Jephthah the sacrifice of his daughter. Perjury and broken vows were early recognised among the gravest of crimes. The ordeal was in like manner the inquisition of a divine judge. When the Adum draught was administered to an accused Ashanti upon the Gold Coast, the god condescended to enter with it; he looked around for the signs of guilt, and if he found none he returned with the nauseous mixture to the light of day. It was a procedure analogous to the ancient rite embedded in the Levitical Law as the test of a wife's faithlessness (cp. Num. v. 11 sqq.).
Another mystery lay in dreams, which have been connected with supersensual powers all the world over. To the savage who cannot analyse his experience the dream-world is as real as that of his waking hours. The dreams that follow fasts, whether compulsory through deficient food, or voluntary through preparation for some solemn event, possess peculiar vividness; and, when attention has been fixed upon some expected crisis, readily acquire a prophetic significance. Divine forms are seen, and strange intimations are conveyed from another world. The dream verses of the Icelander brought tidings from those who had been lost at sea. To sleep upon the grave of a dead kinsman, still more of a hero or a seer, was the means of receiving communications from the wisdom of the dead. Did not philosophy teach that in sleep the mind is less hampered by its physical environment, and attains truth more nearly; and what condition was so suitable, therefore, for the beneficent revelation of a god?
In Greece, accordingly, the practice of sleeping at the tombs of heroes or in the temples of gods was regularly organised. The sanctuaries of Æsculapius, of which more than two hundred can be traced round the Eastern Mediterranean and in Italy, were specially frequented by patients who resorted thither for medical treatment and the advice of the god. The sufferer must pass through the preliminary discipline of the bath, and to his purifications must add the due offering of a sheep. The victim's fleece was carried into the holy precincts, and on it the sick man lay down for the night. In the visions of the dark hours the god appeared, and prescribed the mode of cure, or even condescended to operate himself. An inscription at Epidaurus records that the stiffened fingers of a patient were straightened out and restored for use by the god's own grasp. Was it surprising that Æsculapius should become the object of increasing reverence, and in the second century of our era should be enthroned in the highest as "Saviour (or Preserver) of the universe"?
Under other conditions the visitation of the god expresses itself in poetic form. Among the ruder peoples whose songs are of the simplest—perhaps the most childish—kind, the faculty of rhythmic utterance seems superhuman. Words, lines, stanzas, follow each other with a spontaneity which seems out of the reach of ordinary effort. The chants of worship have been again and again carried back to divine authorship in a distant past. The marriage of speech with music is no art of man. So the Finnic hero, Wäinamöinen, conceived by the wind, and born (after seven hundred years in the womb) by the maiden Dmatar, added to his gifts of fertility and fire the invention of the harp, and the teaching of wisdom, poetry, and music to man. Odin was the god of wisdom and poetry for Scandinavia, god also of the holy draught, which, like the Indian Soma, gave inspiration. The poet brewed Odin's mead, bore Odin's cup; and in old Teutonic speech was godh-mālugr, "god-inspired." Hermes passed in Greece as the inventor of the lyre, which he gave to Apollo, chief among the deities who declared to man the unerring counsel of Zeus; and Homer already counts singer and song as alike divine.
The lovely forms of the Muses, daughters of Zeus and Memory, or with an alternative mother in Harmony, were endowed with functions of song and prophecy, and between them and the historic poets stood a group, half mythical, half human, whose names were attached to actual hymns and poems. Such were Orpheus, Musseus, Eumolpus, Thamyris, and Linos. The verses ascribed to them tended to acquire an authoritative character; they were cited as a rule or norm for conduct; they were on the way to become a Scripture. Homer and Hesiod were employed in the same way; and Plato denounces the mendicant prophets who went to rich men's doors offering to make atonements, and quoting Homer and Hesiod as religious guides. Nevertheless, though he proposed to banish from his ideal State the poets who said unworthy things of the gods, he elsewhere formulates the highest claim for poetry as a supernatural product. The poets are only the interpreters of the gods by whom they are severally possessed; "God takes away the minds of the poets;" "God himself is the speaker, through them he is conversing with us." It is the lament of the Bantus of South Africa that since the white man came the springs of music and song have ceased to flow: "The spirits are angry with their children, and do not teach them any more."
Another mode of converse between deity and man was found in the oracle. Widespread was the belief that through certain chosen persons or in certain peculiar spots the gods deigned to communicate with those who sought their aid. Such agencies were peculiarly numerous in the Hellenic world, and the oracle at Delphi acquired supreme importance. As early as the eighth century B.C., in the days of Amos and Isaiah, it is rising into prominence as an authority that may take the leading place in Greek religion. At one time it almost seemed as if it might succeed in co-ordinating the separate and often opposing forces of the City States, and blend them into national unity. If that hope was ever cherished by its guardians, they failed to realise it. The higher minds discerned in it capacities which were never fulfilled. They saw it give counsel to rival powers, promote enterprise, and support plans of colonisation. They knew that it exercised a far-reaching moral authority; it compelled reverence for oaths, and secured respect for the lives of women, suppliants, and slaves; and again and again in true prophetic spirit it subordinated ritual to ethical demands. With the widest outlook over human affairs, Plato proposes to establish the midpoint of religious legislation in Delphi at Apollo's shrine: "He is the god who sits in the centre, on the navel of the earth, and he is the interpreter of religion to all mankind." It is the note of universalism: had not Jeremiah proclaimed two centuries before on behalf of Yahweh at Jerusalem: "My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations"?
When the Israelites had renewed their temple in the days of Darius, and the scribes were beginning to busy themselves with the remains of their national literature, Greek writers also interested themselves in the collection of the utterances of the past. About 500 B.C. Onomacritus gathered together the oracles of Musæus. It was the first instance of what became a frequent practice in later days; one of Plato's disciples, Heracleides of Pontus, undertook a similar task; so did Chrysippus the Stoic. A special literature was thus begotten. The circumstances which called for the successive oracles were duly narrated; and had Delphi maintained its early position, here would have lain the nucleus of a Scripture, which might have developed into a permanent record of revelation.
Italy, in like manner, had its libri fatales, its sacred books of destiny. There were Etruscan oracles under the name of the nymph Begoe or Vegone; there were the Marcian Songs, said to have been adopted as genuine by the Roman Senate in 213 B.C. The ancient city of Veii had its books; Tibur (Tivoli) the "lots" of the nymph Albunea. Most famous of all were the Sibylline books, brought (according to later tradition) from Cumæ to Rome, perhaps in the last days of the monarchy, or a little later (about 500 B.C.), and placed in the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol under the charge of two special guardians. These were afterwards increased to ten, and in the year 51 B.C. to fifteen. The office remained till the books were destroyed in A.D. 400, when Christianity had been finally established as the imperial religion. What they contained is doubtful; how they were consulted is not known. Their aid was sought after prodigies, pestilence, or disaster had awakened general alarm; but their actual words were not made public. Nevertheless they supplied the basis for important religious innovations. The introduction of Greek deities by their sanction profoundly affected Roman religious ideas, and left deep marks on literature and art.
In the year 83 B.C. the temple which contained the books was burned. The greatest anxiety was displayed for their restoration. Envoys were sent to Sicily, Greece, and Asia Minor to collect fresh verses; they were deposited in a new temple, and prophecies were founded on them in the last days of the Republic. But it was believed that spurious verses had got into circulation, and Augustus ordered a rigid examination. Some two thousand volumes, it is alleged, were destroyed; those which were admitted as genuine were removed to a temple of Apollo which Augustus had himself dedicated on the Palatine hill. Here are the characteristics of a Canon. The books are kept under special charge in a temple. Their authority suffices to modify old cults and introduce new. When they perish, they must be restored. The false must be separated from the true, the genuine eliminated from the spurious. The Amoral element in them seems to have been entirely subordinated to the ritual; but they were believed to express in seasons of difficulty and danger the demands of the gods.
The transition to what are formally called "Sacred Books" leaves a considerable literature upon the boundary. The collection of the ancient national Finnic songs, made with so much patience by the Swedish Lonrott, under the name of the Kalevala, presents no claim to inspiration, but it is the poetical expression of the national religion. In the literature of the Eddas, the Volospa (p. [248]) is a product of the prophetic spirit. After Herodotus remarked that Homer and Hesiod made the gods of the Greeks, the Homeric poems acquired more and more authority, until by the usage of centuries they gained a semi-canonical position. Lectures were given upon their sacred text, and the most extravagant methods of interpretation were employed to reconcile them with the world-view of philosophy. The ancient Egyptian accepted the "Book of the Dead" as his guide to the next world. Chapters of it were inscribed on the walls of his tomb, engraved on his coffin, or laid inside it with his mummy. It contained the charms needful for the preservation of his soul on its journey to the land of the West. Its authors were unknown, but it contained the secrets of the life to come.
The "Bibles of Humanity," as the foundation-books of the great religions have been called, belong to one continent. Asia has been the mother of them all. The oldest takes shape in India in the Vedic hymns; and the immense literatures of Brahmanism, early and later Buddhism, and the Hinduism which finally drove Buddhism off the field, follow in due course. Cognate in language with the immigrant Aryans, the ancient Persians preserved, amid many losses, some of the compositions of their prophet Zarathustra, mingled with religious documents of later date, known to modern students by the name Zend Avesta. Palestine produces Judaism, with its collection of national literature embracing law, history, prophecy, poetry, and wisdom. Judaism gives birth to Christianity, which sets its New Testament beside the Old; and Judaism and Christianity lie behind Mohammed and the Koran, where the person and the book blend in the closest union.
In the Far East Chinese culture reposes on the so-called Classics, the five King and the four Shu, which had a chequered history till they finally acquired their position as fountains of knowledge and models of composition. The ancient odes of the Shî King, the traditions of rulers and the counsels of statesmen in the Shu King, the collections of the teaching of Confucius and Mencius, and the remaining works which need not be mentioned here, raise none of the claims which have been preferred for the Indian Veda, or the Christian Bible. Nor does the singular little book of aphorisms ascribed to Lao-Tsze, which serves as the starting-point for Taoism (p. [67]). The Shintoist of Japan finds the earliest records of his religion in the national chronicles known as the Kojiki and the Nihongi; and the modern believer, who has been offered an infallible Bible, responds with a profession of faith in the practical inerrancy of his own traditional books.
Some smaller communities claim a passing word. The Jains (p. [61]), once the rivals of the Buddhists, possess a sacred literature only less copious. Group after group appears in mediæval India singing the hymns of its founder, such as the Kabir-panthis, till the poet Tulsi-Das (born 1532) embodies in his version of the ancient Rāmāyana the essence of Hindu religion for some ninety millions from Bengal to the Punjab. The Sikhs (p. [62]) stay themselves upon the words of their holy teachers in the Ādi-Granth. The followers of Mani in the third century of our era, who threatened the progress of the Christian Church, and spread all the way from Carthage to Middle Asia, possessed a gospel and epistles of their Prophet, portions of which were brought to Berlin a few years ago from Chinese Turkestan. The Druzes of the Lebanon, whose origin goes back to the Caliph Hakim at Cairo in the eleventh century A.D., treasure the documents of the faith in 111 treatises and epistles, starting from Hakim's vizier, Hamza. And the hapless prophet of Persia, who designated himself the Bab (p. [70]), composed in the Beyyan (among numerous other works) an exposition of the Truth for his disciples. For such small communities a sacred literature is in fact a necessity. Without it they have no adequate cohesion. It is at least one of the conditions of permanent resistance to the forces of decay.
Around the Scriptures of the greater religions devout reverence has gathered with ardent faith. The Hindu term Veda (meaning literally "knowledge") has a narrower and a wider sense. In its limited application it denotes the four collections of hymns, of ritual formulæ, and sacrificial songs, of which the Rig-Veda is the most important (p. [10]). Their history must be inferred from their contents; of the circumstances of their formation there is no external evidence, save that the early Buddhist texts show that the fourth or Atharva-Veda had not acquired canonical value in the days of the Teacher Gotama. But the term Veda is also extended to include a mass of ceremonial compositions known as Brāhmanas, attached to one or other of the ancient collections, and handed down in different religious schools. These are all included more or less definitely in what a Western theologian might term "Revelation." They are technically designated as çruti or "hearing"; they form the matter of the sacred teaching transmitted orally, which must be reserved for a special order and not imparted to the world outside.
The books of household law, on the other hand, prescribing the domestic ceremonies for birth, marriage, and death, regulating caste-privileges, and laying down rules for the conduct of life, were open to all. But just as the Rig-Veda was exalted into a reproduction on earth of what existed eternally in heaven, so endeavours were made to convert the legal works current in particular schools into sacred codes of divine origin. One was boldly ascribed to Vishnu, who communicated it to the goddess of the earth. Another, most famous of all, was attached to Manu, the eponymous hero of the human race. "Father Manu" he is called in the Rig-Veda, and as the sire of mankind he was the founder of social and moral order. First king, and Rishi (or seer) privileged to behold the sacred texts, he was the inventor of rites and author of the maxims of law. And yet higher dignity belonged to him, for he sprang from the Self-Existent and could thus be identified with Brahma himself; and as Prajāpati (p. [143]) he took part in the creation of the world. In due course poetry and philosophy had their turn. The immense epic known as the Mahābhārata, where tradition and myth and imaginative speculation are blended in rich confusion, was put in the scales by the gods against the four Vedas, and its sanctity outweighed them all.
The Buddhist Scriptures were early grouped in three divisions under the title of the Three Baskets. The teachings of the Supremely Enlightened were of course absolutely true, and his rules for the members of his Order were of compelling authority. It was assumed that they were recited correctly at an assembly held immediately after his decease. The "Buddha-Word" thus became the infallible standard of faith and practice. There are traces of provision to meet difficulties in case different elders should believe themselves to possess varying traditions of the Buddha's commands: but not even the enormous expansion of the Scriptures of the Great Vehicle, as preserved in China and Japan, shook the faith of the disciple in the authentic character of their doctrine. The higher teaching belonged to the later years of the Buddha's life, and was transmitted by special channels. It is much as if Gnosticism had established itself in the Christian Church of the second century, and had formed its literature into a Canon beside our New Testament. Nepal, according to the testimony of Bryan Hodgson, raised its sacred books into objects of worship. Chinese respect was satisfied when they were issued from time to time (p. [66]) with a preface by the imperial Son of Heaven.
The oldest portion of the sacred literature collected under the name of the Zend Avesta consists of five hymns (called Gathas), ascribed to Zarathustra himself. They bear many marks of high antiquity, and they acquired a peculiar sanctity, so that the later sacrificial hymns already regard them as objects of homage to which worship should be offered. Above the actual Scriptures rose a radiant figure, in which the conception of revelation was impersonated. Iranian thought was markedly idealist; each earthly object had its spiritual type, its antecedent or counterpart in the heavenly realm. The religion and law of Zarathustra had their representative in Daena, who is already celebrated with pious praise in the Avesta. Sacrifice is offered to her as she dwells in the Heavenly House, the Abode of Song. Thence Zarathustra summons her, beseeching her fellowship—she is associated with Cista, "religious knowledge"—and he asks of her mystic powers and righteousness in thought and speech and deed. Later teaching declared her to be produced by Vohu Mano, the "Good Mind" of Ahura Mazda himself (p. [131]). As the actual utterance of the Lord Omniscient, the sacred Law might also be called his mãthra çpenta or "Holy Word."
Jewish theology was not altogether deficient in similar conceptions. Corresponding to the Torah or Law imparted to Moses, was a heavenly Torah, infinitely richer in content. It formed one of a mysterious group of seven Realities which existed, like the Throne of Glory, Eden, and Gehenna, before the making of the earth and sky. It was a kind of epitome of all possible cosmic relations, so that as an architect frames his plan for a city, God looked into the Torah when he would create the world. Christian theology has never employed this imagery to express its conception of Revelation. But it lies at the back of the curious language of the Koran concerning the "Mother of the Book" (p. [13]). Mohammedan theologians reckoned no less than ten ways in which the Prophet received his revelations. Sometimes the divine inspiration came in a dream, sometimes like the noise of a bell through which he recognised the words which Gabriel wished him to understand. Other books had been given previously to Moses, to David, to Jesus, and each nation would be summoned to its own book at the judgment. The believer in Islam recognised in the "Mother of the Book" the pre-existent or Eternal Word, which God from time to time "sent down" to his Prophet. It had definite size and aspect for Arab imagination. The commentator Jalâlain described it as existing in the air above the seventh heaven. There angel guardians defended it from theft by Satan or the change of any of its contents. It was as long as from heaven to earth, and as broad as from east to west; and its consistency was of one white pearl. Was it surprising that Mohammedan faith should support the utterance of the pious Câdi Iyâd (who died in Morocco, A.D. 1149): "The Koran, as it lies between the two covers is God's own word, which he imparted by way of inspiration to the Prophet. Therefore is it in every way inimitable, and no man can produce anything like it"?
Christian theology has refrained from these physical emblems. But it was possible for a scholar of unquestioned learning to declare in the pulpit of the University of Oxford barely half a century ago (1861) that "the Bible is none other than the voice of him that sitteth upon the throne. Every book of it, every chapter of it, every verse of it, every word of it, every syllable of it (where are we to stop?), every letter of it, is the direct utterance of the Most High ... faultless, unerring, supreme."