Law.
The effects produced by their new relation to each other upon the individual members of this group were very important. Hitherto such idea of law as existed was confined to the mandates or traditional regulations of the patriarchs. Law was at first inseparably connected with religion. It was looked upon as a series of regulations handed down by some ancestor who had received the regulations by Divine inspiration. This notion of the origin of law is so general, that it is to be met with in the traditions of almost every nation. Thus we find the Egyptians reputing their laws to the teachings of Hermes (Thoth); while the lawgivers of Greece, Minôs and Lycurgus, are inspired, the one by Zeus the other by Apollo. So too the Iranian lawgiver Zoroaster is taught by the Good Spirit; and Moses receives the commandments on Mount Sinai. Now, though this idea of law is favourable to the procuring obedience to it, it produces an injurious effect on the law itself, by rendering it too fixed and unalterable. Law, in order to satisfy the requirements and changes of life, should be elastic and capable of adaptation; otherwise, regulations which in their institution were beneficial will survive to be obnoxious under an altered condition of society. But so long as laws are regarded as Divine commands they necessarily retain a great degree of rigidity. The village community, in disconnecting the source of law from the patriarchal power, tended to destroy this association. The authority of the patriarch was a part of the religion of the early Aryans; he was at once the ruler and the priest of his family; and though this union between the two characters long continued to have great influence on the conception of law, the first efforts at a distinction between Divine and human commands sprang from the regulations adopted by the assembly of the village. The complete equality and the joint authority exercised by its members was an education in self-government, which was needed to enable them to advance in the path of civilization, teaching them the importance of self-dependence and individual responsibility.
Those who learnt that lesson best displayed in their history the greatness of its influence, having gained from it a vigour and readiness to meet and adapt themselves to new requirements such as was never possessed by those absolute monarchies which sprang out of an enlarged form of the principle of patriarchal government. The history of the various states which arose in Asia, each in its turn to be overwhelmed in a destruction which scarcely left a trace of its social influence, exhibits in a very striking manner the defects which necessarily ensue when a people ignorant of social arts attempts to form an extensive scheme of government. The various races who have risen to temporary empire by the chances of war in the East, have been in very many instances nomadic tribes whose habits had produced a hardihood which enabled them to conquer with ease their effeminate neighbours of the more settled districts, but whose social state was not sufficiently advanced to allow them to carry on any extended rule. Used only to their simple nomadic life, they were suddenly brought face to face with wants and possessions of which they had hitherto had no experience, and which lay beyond the bounds of their customs or ideas. They contented themselves with exacting from the conquered such tribute as they could extort, leaving their new subjects to manage their own affairs much as they had done before, till the conquerors, gradually corrupted by the luxuries which their position afforded, and having failed to make for themselves any firm footing in their new empire, were in their turn overwhelmed by fresh hordes of nomadic invaders.
Such, indeed, may be the fate of any nation. Such was the fate of Rome. Her mighty empire, too, fell; but how different a record has she left behind from that of the short-lived monarchies of the East! Having learnt in her earliest infancy, better perhaps than any other nation, how to reconcile the conflicting theories of the household and the community, she never flagged in her study of the arts of government. Early imbued with a love of law and order, her people discovered in due time how to accommodate their rule to the various conditions of those which came under their sway. Her laws penetrated to the remotest boundaries of her state, and the rights of a Roman citizen were as clearly defined in Britain as in Rome itself. Thus the Romans have left behind them a system of law the wonder and admiration of all mankind, one which has left indelible marks on the laws and customs, the arts and civilization, of every country which once formed part of their dominions.
Such were among the changes resulting from the adoption of the village community; but their influences only gradually asserted themselves, and the extent of their development was very various among different peoples. In India, the religious element in the household had always a peculiar force, and its influence continued to affect to a great extent the formation of the community. There this organization never lost sight of the patriarchal power, and has exhibited a constant tendency to revert to that more primitive social form. Among the Slavonic tribes the community seems to have found its most favourable conditions, and some of the reasons for this are not difficult to discern. The Slavs in Russia have for a long time had open to them an immense tract of thinly inhabited country, their only rivals to the possession of which were the Finnish tribes of the north. Now, the village community is a form peculiarly adapted for colonization, and this process of colonizing fresh country by sending out detachments from over-grown villages seems to have gone on for a long time in Russia; so that the communities which still exist there present a complete network; all are bound by ties of nearer or more distant relationship to each other; every village having some ‘mother-village’ from which it has sprung.[55] Having a practically boundless territory awaiting their settlement, none of those difficulties in obtaining land which led to the decay of the village in western Europe affected the Russians in their earlier history.
With the Teutons the village had a somewhat different history. It is difficult to determine exactly to what extent it existed among them; but traces of its organization are still discoverable among the laws and customs of Germany and England. The warlike habits of the German tribes, however, soon produced a marked effect on this organization. The chief of the village, whether hereditary or elective, was under normal conditions possessed of but little power. Among a warlike people, however, the necessity for a captain or dictator must have been much greater than with peaceful tribes; for war requires, more than any other pursuit, that it should be directed by an individual mind. Among the peaceful inhabitants of India or Russia the village head-man was generally some aged and venerable father exercising a sort of paternal influence over the others through the reverence paid to his age and wisdom. The habits of the Teutons gave an excessive importance to the strength and vigour of manhood, and they learnt to regard those who exhibited the greatest skill in battle as their natural chieftains.
CHAPTER VIII.
RELIGION.
We have hitherto been occupied in tracing the growth of inventions which had for their end the supply of material wants, or the ordering of conditions which should enable men to live peaceably together in communities, and defend the products of their labour from the attacks of rival tribes and warlike neighbours. A very little research into the relics of antiquity, however, brings another side of human thought before us, and we discover, whether by following the revelations of language or by examining into the traces left in ancient sites, abundant proof to show that the material wants of life did not alone occupy the thoughts of our remote ancestors any more than our own, and that even while the struggle for life was fiercest, conjectures about the unseen world and the life beyond the grave, and aspirations towards the invisible source of life and light they felt to be around them, occupied a large space in their minds. God did not leave them without witness at any time, but caused the ‘invisible things to be shown by those that do appear.’ And even in the darkest ages and among the least-favoured races there were always to be found some minds that vibrated, however feebly, to the suggestions of this teaching, and shaped out for themselves and their tribe some conception of a Divine Ruler and His government of the world from those works of His hands of which their senses told them. Before commerce, or writing, or law had advanced beyond their earliest beginnings, religious rites and funeral rites had no doubt been established in every tribe, and men’s thoughts about God and His relationship to His creatures had found some verbal expression, some sort of creed in which they could be handed down from father to son and form a new tie to bind men together. The task of tracing back these rites and creeds to their earliest shape is manifestly harder than that of tracing material inventions, or laws between man and man, to their first germs, for we are here trenching on some of the deepest questions which the human mind is capable of contemplating—nothing less, indeed, than the nature of conscience and the dealings of God Himself with the souls of His creatures. We must therefore tread cautiously, be content to leave a great deal uncertain, and, making up our minds only on such points as appear to be decided by revelation, accept on others the results of present researches as still imperfect, and liable to be modified as further light on the difficult problems in consideration is obtained.
Explanation of
mythology through
the study of
language.
The study of language has perhaps done more than anything else to clear away the puzzles which mythologies formerly presented to students. It has helped in two ways: first, by tracing the names of objects of worship to their root-forms, and thus showing their meaning and revealing the thought which lay at the root of the worship; secondly, by proving the identity between the gods of different nations, whose names, apparently different, have been resolved into the same root-word, or to a root of the same meaning, when the alchemy of philological research was applied to them.