Others grew and extended, vitalised by new thoughts, appropriate to the new environment, or were carried far and wide by victorious rulers or enthusiastic votaries. It is generally true, as Professor Toy has observed, that, in early conditions, the life of a religion depends on the life of the tribe or state which has adopted it, and that “the larger the community, the more persistent and vigorous its religion will be.”[298]
But the secret of success lay within rather than without; the particular faith must pass through certain internal transformations in order to fit it for the wider field opened to it. The chief of these stadia of progress may be described as a transference of religious thought: 1. From the object to the symbol; 2. From the ceremonial law to the personal ideal; and 3. From the tribal to the national conception of religion.
1. The rudest phases of religion connect the ideas of the Divine with particular external objects, a tree, a rock, a special place, around which grow up a series of local myths and usages. Such ideas, to develop, must break away from these connections with concrete and localised relations. They must become generalised, and the symbol be substituted for the object.
Instead of a particular tree, for instance, the sign of the tree, the cross or the pole (asherim), will be adopted. This represents not the original object but the personified activity, the spirit or god which was supposed earlier to inhabit the given object or spot.
Thus the mind is freed from its bondage to a purely material, geographically single, perception, and the first step is taken toward universal or world-ideas of divinity. In metaphysical terms, it is a passage from the concrete to the abstract, from the particular to the general, from the real to the ideal; a line of progress which must necessarily be followed by man’s intelligence in order to develop his especially human attributes.
2. The second important step was that which substituted for the bare and cold prescriptions of the ceremonial law the ideal of personal perfection. The beginnings of this are visible even in the lowest faiths, as we see in their veneration of those who, they considered, had fulfilled most completely their notions of duty. Such persons were held to have descended from the gods, or were inspired by them.
It is true these early ideals are of little more than physical strength and mental cunning; but their attributes gradually expanded to include corporeal beauty, intellectual power, and ethical grandeur.
We thus arrive, still in primitive conditions, to such personal ideals as Quetzalcoatl among the Aztecs, of whom it was said in their legends that he was of majestic presence, chaste in life, averse to war, wise and generous in actions, and delighting in the cultivation of the arts of peace; or as we see among the Peruvians, in their culture hero Tonapa, of whose teachings a Catholic writer of the sixteenth century says: “So closely did they resemble the precepts of Jesus, that nothing was lacking in them but His name and that of His Father.”[299]
When these ideals were not distinctly men, but were partially or wholly divine, nevertheless the contemplation of an existence whose chief aim was to do good to those who complied with his instructions, to protect those who fled to him, and to grant the petitions of those who prayed to him, was both a comforting and ennobling conception.
3. Professor Thiele in his work on the ancient Egyptian religion makes the wise observation: “The revolution brought about by religious universalism is the greatest and most complete which the history of the world can show.”[300]