Another ancient theory still survives, that which has its name from Euhemerus, a Sicilian writer of the time of Alexander the Great. He claimed that religions arose from the respect and reverence paid to kings and heroes during their lives, continued by custom after their deaths. Under the modern name of “ancestor worship” this has been maintained by Herbert Spencer and others as the primitive source of all worship.
Yet another philosophical opinion has been that religions were due to the craft of rulers and priests, who, by the aid of superstitious fear, sought to keep their subjects and votaries in subjection. These tricksters invented the terrors of another world to secure their own power and places in this one. This opinion was a favourite about the time of the French Revolution and is mirrored in the poems of Shelley, who announced it as one of his missions, “to unveil the religious frauds by which nations have been deluded into submission.”[32]
The prevailing theory of the great world-religions, Christianity and Mohammedanism, has been substantially that of Empedocles. They have regarded all the religions of the world as cunning fabrications of the Devil and his imps, snares spread for human souls; always with one exception however: each excepts itself. This is the view so grandly expressed in Milton’s Paradise Lost and quite common yet in civilised lands.
On the other hand, a strong school of Christian writers, led early in this century by Joseph de Maistre and Chateaubriand and represented in our tongue by Archdeacon Trench, have asserted that all faiths, even the most savage, are fragments and reminiscences, distorted and broken indeed, of a primitive revelation vouchsafed by the Almighty to the human race everywhere at the beginning. These have occupied themselves in pointing out the analogies of savage and pagan creeds and rites with those of Christianity, in proof of their theory.
Not remote from them are the teachers of the doctrine of the “inner light,” that “light which lighteth every man who cometh into the world,” disclosing unto him the existence of God and the fact of his soul. They teach, with Wordsworth, that
“Trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God who is our home;”
and that it is by perversion or wilful blindness that any man avers ignorance of these primal truths.
The philosophic aspect of this theory has been presented by the master minds of Kant, Hegel, and Schelling. Kant identified the idea of God with the Ideal of Reason, the perfect Intelligence, toward which all minds, even the humblest, must necessarily strive. Hegel, in a fine passage of his Philosophy of Religion, urges the study of pagan and primitive religions with a view to define their real significance and to discover the grains of truth which ever lie within them, the reason and the goodness which give them life.
The modern German ethnographers, such as Peschel, Ratzel, and Schurtz,[33] have not ventured to follow these earlier thinkers of their nation, but have contented themselves with tracing the origin of religion to one characteristic of the human intellect, to wit, the notion of Cause. The relation of cause and effect, they claim, is so ingrained in the thinking mind that it inevitably leads all men to assume causes, such as spiritual agencies, when others are not visible.