There is a further point which Mr Baring Gould must settle. Religion may be theoretically regarded as an affair of growth, progressive, or as an affair of revelation, or something so nearly counterfeiting revelation as to arise spontaneously; but it cannot well be both. Now, in the pages of Mr Baring Gould it appears at one time “springing into life” (p. 109), and, as in the passage above, analogously to a conception in the mind:—“At first it is full of vigour, constantly on the alert to win converts;” at another, “as a conception slowly evolved;” then all at once “a living belief, vividly luminous” (p. 109). Again (p. 110), “Religion does not reach perfection of development at a bound; generations pass away, before,” &c; and (p. 329) we find that in all primitive religions the idea of God is the idea of a devil, or (id.) “that the first stage in the conception of a devil is the attribution of evil to God,” which is different, inasmuch as it supposes man to start with the knowledge of God, and is, moreover, inconsistent with what is said at page 113:—“The shapeless religion of a primitive people gradually assumes a definite form. It is that of nature worship. It progresses through polytheism and idolatry, and emerges into monotheism or pantheism.” Of course this is said upon the assumption that the primitive man was barbarous. But however remote from the fact, it is theoretically as conceivable that man should worship nature as an ideal of beauty and power, as that he should regard it from the first as an apparition of terror; or, in other words, that taking nature-worship for granted, Mr Max Müller’s view of it, viz.:—“He begins to lift up his eyes, he stares at the tent of heaven, and asks who supports it? He opens his eyes to the winds, and asks them whence and whither? He is awakened from darkness and slumber by the light of the sun, and Him whom his eyes cannot behold, and who seems to grant him the daily pittance of his existence, he calls ‘his life, his breath, his brilliant Lord and Protector’” (Chips, i. 69, apud B. G., 139),—is as likely to be the true one as Mr Baring Gould’s,[120] viz.:—“At first man is ... antitheist; but presently he feels resistances.... The convulsions of nature, the storm, the thunder, the exploding volcano, the raging seas, fill him with a sense of there being a power superior to his own, before which he must bow. His religious thought, vague and undetermined, is roused by the opposition of nature to his will” (p. 137).
Mr Baring Gould postulates, I am aware, the lapse of several generations for the evolution of these ideas. But there is nothing in Mr Baring Gould’s statement of the progression or development of the conception of the Deity among mankind which might not pass in rapid sequence through the mind of the primitive man,—call him “Areios,” if you shrink from close contact with history, and refuse to call him Adam. Why then the indefinite lapse of time? why the progressive advance of the idea through successive generations of mankind? Why, except that the primitive barbarism must be assumed; and because (p. 239), “in the examination of the springs of religious thought, we have to return again and again to the wild bog of savageism in which they bubble up.” But if the savagery was so great, the perplexity how man ever came to make the first step in the induction is much greater than that, having made it, he should proceed on to make the last.
It is certain that reason can prove the existence of God and His goodness, and this knowledge evokes the instincts of love and worship. It is true also that man has a conscience of right and wrong, and that among its dictates is a sense of the obligation of love and worship. Still this will not account for the existence of religion in the world. Much less will Mr Baring Gould’s theory of an induction by mankind collectively, spread over several centuries, account either for the notion or for the institution.
Neither, apart from direct or indirect revelation, would it prove more than that man was religious, though without religion; capable of arriving at the knowledge of God’s existence, but without any knowledge how to propitiate him; seeking God, but not able to find Him.
Therefore, Mr Baring Gould truly says—“Philosophy alone is not religion.” Philosophy, as we have seen, may prove the existence of God. But religion, from the commencement of the world, has conveyed the idea that there is a particular mode in which God must be worshipped. Here philosophy is entirely at fault. Mr Baring Gould again truly says that “dogma, worship, and discipline are the constituents, so to speak, the mind, spirit, and body of religion” (p. 119). But he goes no further, and does not explain how it came about that mankind in all ages have adhered with singular pertinacity to the notion that religion could teach that on which philosophy must perforce be silent. Has not the greater intellect ever been on the side of philosophy? Nay,[121] in the epochs in which intellectual superiority was undeniably on the side of philosophy, did the populace go to the academy or to the oracles? If the human intellect had originally framed the ritualistic observances, which bore so strange a resemblance in different parts of the world; if human sagacity had originated the idea of sacrifice (and wherefore sacrifice from the point of view of human sagacity?); if philosophy had revealed to them the religious conceptions which they retained, and had been able to define the relation of man to the Divinity—would not mankind, in all ages, have had recourse to its greatest intellects for the solution of its doubts, rather than to the guardians of an obscure and corrupt tradition? The question no doubt is complicated with the evidence as to demonolatry; but the extent to which this prevailed only enforces the argument against Mr Baring Gould, to whom, apparently, the demon (p. 135) is not a real existence, but only the embodiment of a phase of thought, and must seriously embarrass those who attribute the regeneration of man from savagery to intellectual growth and natural progress.
But demonology apart, what would have countervailed against the superiority of reason and the intellectual prestige of the world except a belief in a tradition of primitive revelation? What else will account for the different recognitions of philosophy and religion—priests and sophists? What else would have prevented mankind from resorting in their difficulties to where the greatest intellect was found?
At page 134, this truth seems to gain partial recognition in the pages of Mr Baring Gould:—
“In conclusion, it seems certain that for man’s spiritual well-being, these forces (‘the tendency to crystallise, and the tendency to dissolve’) need co-ordination. Under an infallible guide, regulating every moral and theological item of his spiritual being, his mental faculties are given him that they may be atrophied, like the eyes of the oyster, which, being useless in the sludge of its bed, are re-absorbed. Under a perpetual modification of religious belief, his convictions become weak and watery, without force, and destitute of purpose. In the barren wilderness of Sinai there are here and there green and pleasant oases. How come they there? By basaltic dykes arresting the rapid drainage which leaves the major part of that land bald and waste. So in the region of religion, revelations and theocratic systems have been the dykes saving it from barrenness, and encouraging mental and sentimental fertility” (p. 134).
It is impossible that we should quarrel with this illustration, it is so exactly to our point. Is it not another way of affirming the position which I maintain against Sir John Lubbock? ([ch. xii.]) May not we, too, take our stand upon these “oases” of tradition, which “revelations” and “theocratic systems” have formed, and ask what the human intellect has been able to achieve for the spiritual cravings of man in the waste around?
Mr Baring Gould, indeed, says (p. 61):—