As currently taught, no one of the three world-religions named is fully adequate on all these points. The cosmogony of Christianity is a series of Assyrian and Hebrew myths contradicted by modern science, and its ethical purity has been often sullied by efforts to place faith in dogmas above the law of conscience. Mohammedanism, a more genuine monotheism than Christianity, in some respects higher in practical morality (temperance, charity, equality), and certainly superior in power over the emotions, is weak in its doctrine of fatalism and in its degradation of woman. Buddhism is tainted by a profound distrust of the value of the individual life, by a false theory of the universe, and by its borrowed doctrine of metempsychosis; but rises high in its appeals to the sense of justice and right within the mind.
A religion tends to elevate its votaries in the proportion that it withdraws their minds from merely material aims, and sets before them stimulating ideals. This is the distinction between “material” and “ideal” cults. Where the rites are directed mainly to conjuration, where the prayers are for good luck in life, where the myths are mere stories of exaggerated human shapes, there the faith is material. Such were all the religions of the African blacks and of the Eastern and Northern Asiatic tribes. They have never developed any thing higher. Among the whites, however, and in a less degree among the American Indians, there were mythical ideal figures, ranked among the gods, who embodied grand ideal conceptions of the possible perfectibility of man, and served as examples and models for the religious sentiment.[33]
The associative influence of a religion, whether tribal or universal in theory, is singularly powerful. The Mohammedan who looks toward Mecca, the Christian who turns toward Rome, feels a like bond of sympathy with his fellow worshippers of every race and color, as did the Israelite who wended his way to Jerusalem, or the Nahuatl who travelled to the sacred city of Cholula. The pilgrimages, the Crusades, the ecclesiastical Councils of past ages, have collected nations together under the control of ideas stronger than any which practical life can offer.
Other bonds of union are those derived from the practice of
4. The Arts of Life.
Unquestionably the earliest of these to exert such an influence was the construction of a shelter, in other words architecture. We know that even glacial man had learned enough to make himself a house, though it was probably inferior to that of the muskrat. In early conditions one structure sheltered several families. Such are called “communal houses,” and some ethnologists have argued that they are well nigh universal down to a very late day in the evolution of domestic architecture. The temple, the fortified refuge, the city with its grouped homes shut in by a common wall of defence—all these illustrate how architecture has ever tended to bring men together, and strengthen their instincts of association.
Later in time but wider in its influence in the same direction was the growth of agriculture. This art completely revolutionized the habits of life, and rendered possible the advent of civilization. The tribe, dependent on hunting and fishing or on natural products for a livelihood, is necessarily migratory and separative in its habits. The tillage of the ground with equal necessity demands a stable residence and a centralization of individuals. The areas of primitive culture, the sites of the earliest cities, were always in situations favorable to agricultural pursuits.
Along with the cultivation of food-plants went hand-in-hand the domestication of animals. The horse was trained independently in both Europe and Asia, some species of the dog in all continents, the ox for draft and the cow for milk principally in Asia, and the camel for the deserts of Arabia and Africa. These humble aids brought together distant tribes, and assimilated their characters.
The prosecution of the various special arts, as pottery, metal work, textile-fabrics, etc., led to the formation of guilds and the association of workers in particular localities favorable to obtaining and utilizing the raw products. Each such conquest of the inventive faculties drew men into closer bonds of harmonious labor, and opened for them new avenues of joint industry. The pre-historic past of the race is measured by archæologists by the rise and extension of new arts, not because of themselves, but because they are indicative of improved social conditions, greater aggregations of men, more potent actions in history. The fine arts, in crowning the useful arts with the iridescent glory of the ideal, impart to the handiwork of men that universality of motive which unites all into one brotherhood.
The second class of psychic traits are: