Comparative Religion

by J. Estlin Carpenter

CHAPTER VII

RELIGION AND MORALITY

The expression of religion in action produces the offering and the prayer: by sacrifice and devotion, with thanksgiving and requests, do men approach their gods. But there is another way of entering into fruitful obedience to them. Certain kinds of conduct may be acceptable to them, and others not. Are these concerned only with ceremonial acts, or do they include the behaviour of men to each other? How far does religion promote or regulate what we call morality? What are their relations, and how do they affect one another? This question has been discussed in innumerable treatises; attention can only be invited to it here from the point of view of the historical comparison of religions, without reference to philosophical definitions. Every one admits a connection of some sort, for good or for evil, at some period in their respective development. They may not have started hand in hand. Their alliance may be disbanded, and morality may claim total independence. But at some time on the journey they have marched together.

The difficulty of the inquiry arises in part from the variety of views as to the scope and essence of both morality and religion. Where do they begin, and in what do they consist? The philosopher may demand a complete recognition of the freedom of the will, and the independent activity of the conscience, and savages who have no such words are set down as destitute of morality, just as those who have no Heavenly Father and no devil, no heaven and no hell, are described as without religion. It is obviously impossible to expect to find everywhere our categories of right and wrong; yet even Lord Avebury lent his high authority to the statement that there are many savages almost entirely without moral feeling largely on the ground of the absence of ideas of sin, remorse, and repentance. Mr. Huxley in the same way declared it obvious that the lower religions are entirely unethical.

On the other hand, the idealist strenuously affirms the intimacy of the connection. We are assured that the historical beginning of all morality is to be found in religion; or that in the earliest period of human history, religion and morality were necessary correlates of each other; or that all moral commandments have originally the character of religious commandments. And the student of comparative religion like the late Prof. Robertson Smith cautiously affirms that "in ancient society all morality, as morality was then understood, was consecrated and enforced by religious motives and sanctions." The words which we have italicised contain exactly the limitation which is ignored by the philosopher who requires that the gods shall be patterns of conduct, and administrators of an ethical world-order. Plainly the question is settled in different ways according to different standards of what religion and morality mean. If we are content to begin low enough down, we may see reason to believe that in that stage of thought in which religion, magic, and custom are so strangely intertwined, morality is also not wanting. Even the Fijian, who called some of his gods by hideous names, such as "the Rioter," "the Brain-eater," "the Murderer," regarded theft, adultery, and such offences, as serious.

The difficulty of broad general statements lies in the imperfection of our knowledge. Again and again closer observation has revealed quite unexpected secrets. Whole ranges of belief, feeling, action, formerly concealed from observation, have been brought to light. Thus about twenty years ago Major Ellis, writing of the Ewe, Tshi, and Yoruba peoples on the Gold Coast, laid it down that "religion at the stage of growth at which we find it among these three groups of tribes, has no connection with morals, or the relations of men to one another." But the German missionary, Jakob Spieth, now tells us (1911) that among the Ewe-speaking folk not only does Mother Earth punish with death those who have sworn falsely, but Mawu, God, who knows the thoughts and hearts of men, who is the giver of everything good upon the earth—very patient and never angry—will not allow one brother to deceive another, or suffer the king to judge unrighteously, or permit one to burn another's house down. Morality here is more than rudimentary; the justice of man is put under the guardianship of God, who requires "truth in the inward parts." Another West African observer, Major Leonard, on the Lower Niger, describes religion as intermingled with the whole social system of the tribes under his view. It supplies the principle on which their law is dispensed and morality adjudicated. The entire organisation of their common life is so interwoven with it that they cannot get away from it. Like the Hindus, "they eat religiously, drink religiously, bathe religiously, dress religiously, and sin religiously."

The beginnings of morality can no more be discovered historically than the beginnings of religion. Language, in various nations, implies that it springs out of custom. The foundation of practical ethics, whatever may be the ultimate interpretation of such terms as duty and conscience in more advanced cultures, lies in social usage. When any custom is established with sufficient strength to serve as a rule demanding observance, so that its breach evokes some feeling, the seed of morals is already germinating. No group however small, no society however crude, can cohere without some such customs. They may be formed in various ways; they are strengthened by habitual repetition; they acquire the sanction of the past, they are usually referred, when men have begun to ask how they came into being—just as they ask about their own origin—to some great First Man, or some superhuman personality in the realm above (p. [171]). But always there are some things allowable, and others forbidden: some things may (or even must) be done, others may not.

When custom has gained this power, it carries with it an element of control. Impulse must not be inconsiderately indulged, it must be governed. Private interests must be subordinated to a rule, and conduct conformed to a standard of behaviour. In the ruder culture, where the supply of food is of urgent importance, such rules gather around the produce of the chase or of the ground. Among the Australian Kurnai, for example, all game caught by the men, all roots or fruits collected by the women, must be shared with others according to definite arrangements. Methodic distribution is obligatory, and self-denial in sharing and eating is thus impressed upon the young. Moreover certain varieties of food are strictly forbidden to women, children, and boys before initiation.

Prohibitions of this kind, extending over many branches of conduct, are found all over the world. They are often designated by a term in use in Polynesia, taboo (tabu or tapu). Their origin has been much disputed, owing to the extraordinary complexity of the circumstances with which they are concerned. Taboo contains emphatically an element of mystery. It comes out of a vague dim background, and implies that some strange power will be set in perilous operation if a certain thing is done. Such a power, obscure, indefinite, not personalised, but mightier than men, has been recognised at the base of religion under another term, the Melanesian mana (p. [80]). Taboo has been accordingly described as a negative mana. It is a prohibition against calling the weird uncanny force into the open, where it may do unexpected hurt.

The objects and actions placed under such taboos are various; and it is for the anthropologist and the psychologist, if they can, to discover their origin and application in each particular case. They involve ideas of purity and defilement, the holy and the common, the clean and the unclean. They gather in particular round blood, which rouses in some animals as in many human beings an instinctive aversion and disgust, and yet is at the same time sacred as a seat of life. They enter at the great crises of existence, birth and death; the mother, and perhaps also the new-born child, are unclean, and must be purified; the corpse defiles whoever touches it. They attend the sexual processes, which are the occasion of releasing dangerous energies. So they affect people as well as things. The king is charged with this mysterious force, and is hedged round with taboos lest it should suddenly burst forth against the intruder on his sanctity. The chief, the priest, possess it in less degree. And it is transmitted to what belongs to them. Their weapons, their food and, above all, their persons, are sacred. The oft-quoted story of the Maori may still be repeated here: it is not the only case of the kind. Strong and stalwart, he found some food beside the path, and ate it. He learned shortly afterwards that it was the remains of the king's meal. He had violated a royal taboo. The secret power had him in its grasp: he was speedily seized with cramp in the stomach, and in a few hours died.

Ritual religions are full of survivals of such taboos. "O Maker of the material world," inquires Zarathustra of Ahura Mazda, "can he be clean again who has eaten of the carcass of a dog, or the corpse of a man?" In ancient Israel various foods were forbidden by religious law; the priest might not touch a dead body; when a murder had been committed and the murderer could not be found, the elders of the city must solemnly purify the ground which unpunished bloodshed had defiled. Early Roman religion contained many such prohibitions; from certain sacrifices women and strangers and fettered criminals must withdraw; there are traces of taboo on iron and shoe-leather, on burial grounds and spots where thunder-bolts were supposed to have fallen, and on certain days, especially those connected with the cult of the dead. Such taboos still play a great part in savage society, and exert no little moral force in preserving honesty and order. In Samoa, observed Turner, objects placed under taboo are perfectly safe; they are in no danger of theft. Primitive morality is thus brought under the sanction of religion.

All over the world, as we have seen (p. [161]), the young receive a very severe training in preparation for their entry into the full privileges and duties of the tribe. They are then instructed in the traditional rules of conduct, the proper abstinences, the right behaviour of the sexes. Such ceremonies are recognised as of great importance in communities of the simplest form without political control, for it is through them that the social ties of tribal kinship gain coherence and strength. Various observers have testified to the consideration displayed in Australia, for instance, towards the aged, the sick, and the infirm. The blind are often carefully tended, and the best fed. "As a matter of fact," says Mr. Marett, "the earlier and more democratic types of primitive society, uncontaminated by our civilisation, do not present many features to which the modern conscience can take exception; but display rather the edifying spectacle of religious brotherhoods encouraging themselves by mystical communion to common effort."

In West Africa Miss Kingsley noted the close connection in negro communities between religion and life. To get through day or night a man must be right in the religious point of view; he must be on working terms with the great world of spirits round him. In spite of much make-believe the secret societies in which the men are enlisted under solemn oaths, are recognised as important moral agencies. The Ukuku, recently described by Dr. Nassau, could settle tribal quarrels, and proclaim or enforce peace, when no individual chief or king could end the strife. Such organisations regulate marriage laws, the duties of parents and children, the privileges of eldership, the recognition of age and worth. The entry into them lies through the rites of religion.

"I have studied these societies," wrote Miss Kingsley; "I am in possession of fairly complete knowledge of three of them. I know men acquainted with ten other societies, and their information is practically the same as my own, viz. that those rites consist in a series of oath-takings as you pass from grade to grade ... Each grade gives him a certain amount of instruction in the native law. Each grade gives him a certain function in carrying out the law. And finally, when he has passed through all the grades, which few men do, when he has sworn the greatest oath of all, when he knows all the society's heart's secret, that secret is 'I am I,' the one Word. The teaching of that Word is law, order, justice, morality. Why the one Word teaches it, the man does not know. But he knows two things: one that there is a law-god, and the other that, so says the wisdom of our ancestors, his will must be worked or evil will come. So in his generation he works to keep the young people straight."

Taboos may be violated unconsciously, and tribal laws may be transgressed sometimes intentionally, sometimes by accident. The resulting guilt must be removed, if the offender or the community is not to incur the wrath of the affronted Powers. Sin, like holiness, has this peculiar property that it can be communicated by contact. Savage morality does not always rise above the confusion between the physical and the mental. Evil qualities such as uncleanness can be transferred from persons to things, just as from things to persons. Pains and diseases can be extracted from the sufferer, and magically sent into animals or objects which can be driven away or destroyed; and moral evil can be similarly removed. When an Atkhan of the Aleutian Islands had committed a serious offence and desired to unburden himself, he chose a time when the sun was clear, picked up certain weeds, and carried them about his person. After they were thus sufficiently impregnated by contact with him, he laid them down, called the sun to witness, cast his sins upon them, and threw them into the fire. The consuming flame burned away his guilt.

The Peruvian made his confession to the sun, and then bathed in an adjoining river. There he rid himself of his iniquity, saying "O thou river, receive the sins I have this day confessed to the sun, carry them down to the sea, and let them never more appear." The oldest and the most recent rituals repeat the same idea in various forms. In one of the Vedic ceremonials of sacrifice, the sacrificer and his wife towards the close bathed and washed each other's backs. Then having wrapped themselves in fresh garments, they stepped forth, and we read: "Even as a snake casts its skin, so does he cast away all his sin. There is in him not so much sin as there is in a toothless child." Water was likewise employed in Babylonia, where the incantation ran, "I have washed my hands, I have cleansed my body with pure spring water which is in the town of Eridu. All evil, all that is not good, in my body, my flesh, my limbs, begone!" Or, "By the wisdom of thy holy name let the sin and the ban which were created for man's misery be removed, destroyed, and driven away."

Like physical evil such as disease, so moral evil might be attributed to the action of spirits, and periodic ceremonies might be performed for purging the community by driving them out. Sometimes the sins were buried in the ground; sometimes they were thrown into the river; sometimes they were concentrated on a person or an animal; or were magically expelled under the sanction of religion into some object which could be destroyed. In the annual celebration of the Thargelia at Athens, in the month of May, under the solemn sanction of Apollo, two "purifying men" were led through the streets to be whipped with rods, and then driven over the border of the state, bearing the people's sins. The Levitical ritual (Lev. xvi) incorporated at a late date a solemn ceremony on the tenth day of the first month of the ancient religious year (in September), when an act of atonement was performed for the whole nation. Two goats were brought into the sanctuary, and lots were cast upon them. One was dedicated to Yahweh, over the other the high priest confessed the iniquities of the children of Israel; and by the laying on of hands he transferred them to the head of the doomed animal, which was then led forth into the wilderness for a mysterious power of evil, Azazel. As the temporary adjuncts of so much guilt, the high priest and the goat-leader were required to purify themselves afterwards by bathing; the high priest must change his robes, and the goat-leader wash his clothes.

So in modern times in Nigeria the town sins are annually laid on some unhappy slave-girl, perhaps selected some time before. As she is led through the street the householders come forth and discharge the year's accumulated evil on her; then she is dragged to the river, bound, and left to drown. Japan is satisfied without a life. The ancient ritual of purification shows that in the early centuries of the national history a public ceremony was occasionally performed. In the revival of Shinto usage which marked the late reign, it was re-enacted by imperial decree in 1872 for half-yearly celebration on June 30 and December 31, at all Shinto shrines. Four or five days before these dates the believer was enjoined to procure from his priest a piece of white paper cut in the shape of a garment. On this he was to write his name and sex, with the year and month of his birth; then he must rub it over his body, and finally breathe on it. His sins would thus be transferred to the paper robe, which was to be taken back to the priest. Offerings of food and purifying ceremonies would complete the believer's release. The paper garments with their load of guilt were then to be packed in cases which were to be put in boats, rowed out to sea, and committed to the deep. There they would be carried to the great Sea Plain by the Maiden of Descent-into-the-Current, who would convey them to the Maiden of the Swift Opening, dwelling in the Eight Hundred Meetings of the Brine of the Eight Brine Currents. She would swallow them down with a gurgling sound, and the Lord of the Breath-blowing Place would finally blow them away into the Root-Country, the bottom apparently of the under-world!

The relation of morality to religion tends to become more definite along different lines of thought, which are constantly intertwined, and of which three are only isolated here for the purpose of the briefest possible illustration of the forms in which they have appeared historically. In the first place, the world may be regarded as a scene in which rival powers of help and hurt are engaged in constant conflict; and the physical dualism thus exhibited may be reproduced in the sphere of morals as a contest between powers of good and evil. Secondly, the course of nature may be viewed as a world-order, where seasonal uniformities are the manifestation of a permanent principle of harmony which is the guide of human conduct, and the vicissitudes of daily or annual experience are interpreted as the judgments of heaven on man's doings, national or personal. And thirdly, the development of the individual conscience may surmount the confusion which ranks ritual offences along with moral transgressions, and the ethical life may be set wholly free from ceremonial bondage, and carried up into the realm of spirit.

The lower culture all over the world ascribes disease or accident, madness, calamity, and death, to the agency of hostile powers lying in wait for man, and breaking in on his security. The violences of the elements, the hurricane, the flood, the earthquake, the volcanic eruption, are in the same way the work of giants towering in might above the common herd of the demons of air, water, or earth. The spirits of the evil dead, especially of powerful magic-men, Shamans, and the like, of malicious character, are potent for sickness and disaster. But in their unorganised ranks there is no controlling or directing force. Here and there some figure or group emerges into prominence. At the head of the demonic hosts of Babylonian mythology is a band of seven ruling spirits, perhaps the windy counterparts of the sun and moon and the five planets. In Egyptian story Set (or by his Greek name Typhon) is the evil opposite of the good Osiris whom he does to death; or it is the sun himself who is attacked in his nightly journey by the serpent Apap with his monstrous crew. Scandinavian mythology was full of these conflicts. The oppositions of light and darkness, storm and calm, warmth and cold, were felt with unusual vehemence. Over the motley multitude of powers infesting forest and field, the wind and the water, rose the giants of mountain and cataract, the furious blast, the curdling frost. The giants of the frost were evil powers, like the wolf Fenris, and the serpent Nidhogg, who lay beneath one of the roots of the mighty cosmic tree (in Niflheim, a second being among the frost-giants, and a third among the gods), for ever gnawing till the great world's end. Above them rose the dread goddess Hel, the "hollow," once, apparently, the name of the grave, and then of the power that ruled the gloomy underworld, the abode of those who had not fallen upon the battle-field. She, in her turn, was subordinated to Loki, once reckoned among the gods, capricious and tricky, who becomes the father of Hel, the wolf Fenris, and the Midgard snake, and leads the forces of evil for the destruction of the world. He compasses the death of Balder the fair, Odin perishes by the wolf, and Thor by the serpent; though god and wolf and serpent in their turn sink in common ruin. But the powers engaged in the strife are all superhuman; man has no share in the warfare, save when the warriors pass at death into the abode of the gods, and take their place beside them in the final conflict. Loki is no Devil, he does not tempt, or interfere with the children of earth; he does not affect their present conduct or future destiny.

The oppositions of light and darkness belong to every zone all round the world, and were perhaps most strongly felt among the Indo-Iranian branches of the great Aryan family. The name deva in ancient Indian mythology denotes the shining powers of the upper world, the radiant dwellers in the sky. In contrast with it stands another, the asura, once a title of high honour, for it clung even to Varuna, but later degraded to the designation of demonic beings, who appear again and again in contest with the devas for the precious drink of immortality. So the realm of darkness is the realm of evil. Into the pit of darkness are the wicked thrust: and when right and wrong are presented under the forms of truth and falsehood, and untruth is identified with gloom, the poet reached the natural symbolism—"Light is heaven, they say, and darkness hell."

It was, however, among the cognate Iranian people that this antithesis acquired the greatest force, under the influence of the prophet Zarathustra. By a curious historic-religious process which cannot here be traced, the terms of the opposing forces were reversed. Ahura (= asura) remained the name of the Supreme Power, with the addition of the term Mazda, "all-knowing," and the daevas (= devas) became the evil multitude. In the oldest part of the Zend Avesta Ahura appears as the sole Creator, the God of light and purity and truth, who dwells on high in the Abode of Song. Beside him is his Good Mind, and the Holy (or beneficent, gracious) Spirit. But opposed to him in the realm of darkness beneath is "the Lie" (drug), with its correlates the Bad Mind and the Evil Spirit (Añra Mainyu, not yet a proper name). The world between is the scene of continuous struggle, and in this conflict man is called to take his part. Ritual purity, appropriate sacrifice, and personal righteousness in thought, word, and deed, are his weapons in the fight. By these he helps to establish the sovereignty of Ahura, and to curtail the power of "the Lie." The earliest representations offer no account of the origin of the Drug any more than of Ahura himself. But later speculation, impressed with the contrasting elements of human life, began to ascribe to him, too, under the name of Ahriman (Añra Mainyu), creative power; all noxious animals and plants were due to him; plague and disease came from his hands; all agencies of cold, darkness, and destruction were his work; he was the daeva of daevas, Lord of death, and author of temptation. And finally, in the long process of thought the two powers of good and evil had both issued from a still higher unity, Zervan Akarana, Time without bound. But long ere this the Persian character had responded to Zarathustra's teaching of warfare against "the Lie"; and Herodotus bears testimony to their repute for loyalty to truth. For from the earliest days the dualism of Zarathustra bound together morality and religion in the closest alliance. How the great demand for the ultimate victory of good was to be justified will be seen hereafter (p. [247]).

A second group of figures embodying the same idea of the connection of morality with religion is found in the various impersonations of the Order of Nature and its correlate in Law in the world without and the heart within. The speculations of the early Greek philosophers in their attempts to reach an ultimate Unity behind all the diversities of appearance familiarised the higher minds with the idea of the harmony of the cosmos. "Law," sang Pindar, "is king of all, both mortals and immortals." And this sovereign order is represented mythologically by Themis, whom Hesiod exalts to be the daughter of Heaven and Earth, and bride of Zeus. Pindar pictured her as borne in a golden car from the primeval Ocean, the source of all, up to the sacred height of Olympus, to be the consort of Zeus the Preserver. But though she is thus the spouse of the sovereign of the sky, she is in another aspect identified with Earth, scene of fixed rules both in nature and social life, for with the cultus of the earth were associated not only the operations of agriculture, but the rites and duties of marriage, and the maintenance of the family. So Themis is the mother of the seasons in the annual round, and the sequences of blossom and fruit are her work; but among her daughters are also Fair Order, Justice, and Peace, and the world and the State thus reflect obedience to a universal Law.

Behind Greece lay Egypt, where tradition said that Thales, first of Greeks to philosophise, had studied. When the soul of the dead man was brought to the test of the balance (p. [8]), he was supported by the goddesses of Maāt or Truth. Derived from the root mā, "to stretch out," this name covered the ideas of rectitude or right, and Maāt was the splendid impersonation of order, law, justice, truth, in both the physical and moral spheres. She is the daughter—or even the eye—of the Sun-god Rê. But she is conceived in still more exalted fashion as the sovereign of all realms, and is elevated above all relationships. She is Lady of heaven, and Queen of earth, and even Lady of the Land of the West, the mysterious dwellings of the dead. In one aspect she serves each of the great gods as her lord and master; in another she knows no lord or master. So it is by her that the gods live; she is, as it were, the law of their being; alike for sun and moon, for days and hours, in the visible world, and for the divine king at the head of his people. She is solemnly offered by the sovereign to his god, and the deity responds by laying her in the heart of his worshipper, to manifest her everlastingly before the gods. Through the court-phrases gleams the solemn idea that sovereignty on earth is no law to itself; it must follow the ordinances of heaven.

Chinese insight early reached a similar thought. Before the days of Confucius or his elder contemporary Lao-Tsze, the wiser observers had noted the uniformity of Nature's ways. Were not Heaven and Earth the nourishers of all things? Did not Heaven pour down all kinds of influences upon the docile and receptive Earth? Heaven was all-observing, steadfast, impartial; and its "sincerity," seen in the regular movements of the sun and moon, or the succession of the seasons, becomes for the moralist the groundwork of the social order. This daily course is called Heaven's way or path, the Tao (the highway as distinguished from by-tracks), which with unvarying energy maintains the scene of our existence, and provides the norm or pattern for our conduct. In the hands of Lao-Tsze this became the symbol of a great philosophical conception. Behind the visible path which all could see lay the hidden Tao, untrodden and enduring. Here was the eternal source of all things, for ever streaming forth in orderly succession, but never vaunting itself or inviting attention by outbursts of display. It was the type for man to follow; the sage, like Heaven, must have no personal ends; he must act, like the great exemplar, without meddling interference, leaving his nature to fulfil itself; let him renounce ambition and cultivate humility; only one who has "forgotten himself" can become identified with Heaven. "Can you"—so Lao-Tsze was said to have asked an inquirer six hundred years before Jesus taught in Galilee—"Can you become a little child?"

The Vedic seers were hardly less impressed with the sense of an orderly control in contemplating the energies around them. Four words are used to denote the institutes or ordinances, the fixed norms or standards, the solemn laws, and the steadfast path, according to which the rivers flow, the dawn comes forth after the night, the sun traverses the sky, and even the storm winds begin to blow. Of these the last named, the Rita (with its Zend equivalent Asha), the ordered course along which all things move, presents the least abstract, the most mythical form. For here is that which exists before heaven and earth; they are born of it, or even in it, and its domain is the wide space. From it, likewise, the gods proceed, and the lofty pair, Mitra and Varuna, with Aditi and her train, are its protectors. But through the mystical identity of the order of nature and the order of sacrifice (p. [143]), the cultus—whether on earth or in heaven—is also its sphere. Agni, the sacrificial fire, the dear house-priest, is Rita-born, and by its aid carries the offerings to heaven. Such, also, is the sacred drink, the Soma, which is borne in the Rita's car, and follows its ways. And the heavenly sacrificers, the Fathers in the radiant world above, have grown according to the Rita, for they know and faithfully obey the law. Thus it becomes the supreme expression of morality, and is practically equivalent with satya, true (literally, that which is), or good. Heaven and Earth are satya, veracious, they can be trusted; they are ritāvan, faithful to the Path, steadfast in the Order. Not less so is the godly man; he, too, is ritāvan (Zend ashavan), the same word being used to denote divine holiness and human piety. And thus the life of gods and men, the order of nature, the ritual of worship, and daily duty, were all bound together in one principle.

Rita, however, did not establish itself as a permanent conception in Indian theology. Its place was taken by another idea, which still sways the thought and rules the lives of hundreds of millions of believers in India and the Far East, Karma, or the doctrine of the Deed. It is well known that this doctrine does not appear in the Vedic hymns. It is first discussed as a great mystery in the forest-sessions where teachers and students met together, where kings could still instruct Brahmans, and women might speak in debate. In the Brahmana of a Hundred Paths it is summed up in a maxim which was first formulated in connection with ceremonial obligation, but came to have a much wider application: "A man is born into the world that he has made"; to which the Law-books added the warning: "The Deed does not perish."

Man is for ever making his own world. Each act, each word, even each thought, adds something to the spiritual fabric which he is perpetually producing. He cannot escape the results of his own conduct. The values for good or evil mount up from hour to hour, and their issues must be fulfilled. When this conception was carried through the universe, the whole sphere of animated existence was placed under its sway. The life of any single person upon earth was only an incident in a chain of lives, stretching into the distant past as well as into the immeasurable future. His condition hereafter would be determined by what he had done before he entered the state that would match his deed. Then his condition here was also determined by what he had wrought in a previous lot. His personal qualities, his health and sickness, his caste and rank, his wealth or poverty, all precisely matched some elements in the moral product of his past. These were, of course, never all precisely of one kind. They were of mingled good and evil, and each of these would in course of time have its appropriate consequence of joy and pain. For every shade of guilt there was a fitting punishment, exactly adjusted in severity and duration, either in degradation and suffering upon earth, or in some one of numerous hells below. And similarly all good was sure of its reward, as happiness and prosperity awaited it here, or were allotted in still richer measure for their due periods in the heavens that rose tier above tier beyond the sky.

The doctrine of Transmigration has appeared in various forms, in very different cultures. But nowhere has it swayed whole civilisations as it has done in the East. It has expressed for innumerable multitudes the essential bond of morals and religion. There were not wanting, indeed, teachers who criticised and rejected it when Gotama the Buddha passed to and fro five hundred years before our era. But while he repudiated the authority of the Vedas, the ceremonies of sacrifice, the claims of the Brahmans, and the immortality of the gods, he retained the doctrine of Karma at the very core of the system of ethical culture which he offered as the way out of the weary circle of re-birth. The whole meaning of the universe, its cosmic periods of dissolution and evolution, was still moral; and the scene of our existence came once more into being that the unexhausted potencies of countless products of the Deed from the lowest hell to the topmost heaven might realise their suspended energy. And when Buddhism became a religion through the interpretation of the person of its founder in terms of the Absolute and Eternal, this law of the phenomenal world of space and time remained beyond even his power to set aside or change.

The ethical element necessarily varies in richness of content and intensity of feeling in different religions. In the classifications which have been from time to time proposed, attention has often been fixed upon its presence as the marked characteristic of a group. Thus Prof. Tiele, of Leiden, proposed to treat the higher religions of Revelation under two heads: (1) religions embodying a sacred law, and forming national communities, including Taoism, Confucianism, Brahmanism, Jainism, Mazdaism, Mosaism, Judaism, and (2) universalistic communions, Buddhism, Christianity, and to some extent Islam. Another writer forms a class of Morality-Religions above the savage Nature-Religions, and reckons in it the religions of Mexico and Peru, the earliest Babylonian (often called Akkadian), Egyptian, Chinese, Hindu, Persian, German, Roman, Greek. All such classifications are exposed to many difficulties, but they at least bear witness to the significance of the place which is occupied by morality in modern estimates of the worth of great historic faiths. The aspects of any particular development are so manifold, that any attempt to establish a scale of rank at once lays itself open to criticism. Where, for example, is Greece in Prof. Tiele's scheme? It is thrown back into the group of "half-ethical anthropomorphic polytheisms." But in the hands of poets and philosophers, the really shaping powers of Hellenic culture, polytheism was left far behind, and on the third of the questions suggested above in considering the relations of morality and religion (p. [208])—their attitude to ritual obligation—Greek official teaching sometimes reached the loftiest heights.

For not only did philosophical and religious communities like the Pythagoreans enunciate such maxims as these: "Purity of soul is the only divine service," or "God has no place on earth more akin to his nature than the pure soul," but the oracle of Delphi itself was supposed to have affirmed the worthlessness of ceremonial cleansing without corresponding holiness of heart. Dr. Farnell translates two utterances ascribed to the Pythia as follows: "O stranger, if holy of soul, enter the shrine of the holy God, having but touched the lustral water: lustration is an easy matter for the good; but all ocean with its streams cannot cleanse the evil man"; and again: "The temples of the gods are open to all good men, nor is there any need of purification; no stain can ever cleave to virtue. But depart, whosoever is baneful at heart; for thy soul will never be washed by the cleansing of the body." Over the sanctuary of Æsculapius at Epidaurus, where so many sufferers thronged for cure (p. [180]), ran the inscription quoted by Porphyry—

"Into an odorous temple he who goes
Should pure and holy be; but to be wise
In what makes holiness is to be pure."

The religion of Zarathustra, on the other hand, did not maintain its primitive elevation. The prophet's Gāthās (p. [191]) summoned the believer to live in the fellowship of the Good Mind and in obedience to the Most Excellent Order (Asha vahista), and the later Avesta seems sometimes to repeat their high demand: "Purity is for man, next to life, the greatest good; that purity that is procured by the law of Mazda to him who cleanses his own self with good thoughts, words, and deeds." It is the utterance of Ahura himself. But purity may be interpreted in very different ways: the lad who walks about over fifteen years of age without the sacred girdle and sacred shirt, has no forgiveness, for he has "power to destroy the world of the holy spirit"; while, on the other hand, to pull down the scaffold on which corpses had been deposited (the Persians employed neither burial nor cremation) was to destroy a centre of impure contagion, and secure pardon for all sins.

When Moses established the administration of justice at the sanctuary of Yahweh, he planted a powerful ethical influence in the heart of the religion of Israel. No reader of the Old Testament needs to be reminded of the prophetic rebukes of a monarch's crimes. Nathan and David, Elijah and Ahab, have become universal types. The history of Hebrew ethics shows how the conception of morality gradually passed from the regulation of external conduct into the inner sphere of thought; and the offender was no longer regarded merely as a member of a tribe or nation on which punishment might alight collectively; he stood in an immediate relation to his God. Primitive imagination could rest content with supposing that sin had first entered the world through the subtlety of a talking snake. Later thought found such a solution inadequate to enlarged moral experience. In the figure of the Adversary or the Opposer, the Sâtân, first traceable in Israel's literature after the Captivity, Judaism admitted a moral dualism analogous to the opposition between Ahura Mazda and Añra Mainyu. The Sâtân had, indeed, no creative power, though hordes of demons were under his sway in the abyss, and were sent forth to do the desolating work of madness and disease. But he was the head of a realm of evil over against the sovereignty of God; and the intensity of the moral consciousness of sin was reflected in the mythologic form of his warfare against the hosts of heaven.

Along a quite different line of thought, which may possibly have been stimulated from the Greek side, the humanists of later Israel endeavoured to bring nature and social life under one common conception of divine Wisdom. The earlier prophecy had regarded the physical world as plastic in Yahweh's hands, so that its events—such as drought or flood, the locust and the blight, could be made the immediate instruments of Israel's discipline. A wider culture brought new ideas. There were statutes and ordinances for the cosmic powers just as there were for communities of man. The universe was the product of the divine thought, and the same agency was seen in the structure and organisation of human societies. The order of the visible scene was due to the presence and control of Wisdom, which from the first had sat as a kind of assessor by Yahweh's side. The moral order was no less her work; she gave the sanction to all authority and rule; "By me kings reign," cries the poet in her name, "and princes decree justice"; and the men of humble heart know that their piety, "the fear of the Lord," is her gift, and links them in joyous fellowship with the stars on high.

That Mosaism started with a vigorous moral conception of the divine demands, however limited might be its early scope, is generally recognised. The gradual settlement of the immigrant tribes in the land of Canaan, the appropriation of Canaanite sanctuaries, and the adoption of their festivals and ritual, brought new influences which threatened the ancient simplicity. The voices of Hebrew prophecy rang out at Jerusalem ere Greek thought had begun to move. It was a singular result in Israel's history that the great truths of the unity and spirituality and holiness of God, which prophecy had won out of impassioned experience, were confided for their preservation to a code of Priestly Law which raised the elements of ritual and sacerdotal caste to their highest significance in the nation's life. But the law which declared sacrifice to be legitimate only on one altar, made room for a new development of Israel's religion. If the ancient faith was to be maintained by a race that spread from Babylon to Rome, it must adapt its worship to new conditions. There could be but one temple; but a meeting-house could be built anywhere; and the Synagogue thus became the birthplace of the congregations of the Christian Church.