Another assumption underlying the animistic hypothesis, and also borrowed from Christian teaching, is that the savage regards the soul or ghost as the liberated and consummated man, and that therefore he will place God rather in the category of disembodied than of embodied men. Yet not only the Greek and Roman, but even the Jew, looked on the shade of the departed as a mere fraction of humanity, as a miserable residue of man, helpless and hopeless, and withal disposed to be mischievous and exacting, and therefore needing to be humoured in various ways. Nay, even Christianity with its dogma of the bodily resurrection, denies that Platonic doctrine which views the body as the prison rather than as the complement and consort of the soul; although it holds the soul to be of an altogether higher, because spiritual, order. But to the primitive savage, who everywhere regards death as non-natural, as accidental and violent, the surviving spirit, however uncertain-tempered and incalculable in its movements, however much to be feared and propitiated, does not command reverence as a being of a superior order. At best it is: "Alas! poor ghost!" Better a live dog than a dead lion; better the meanest slave that draws breath, than the monarch of Orcus. Surely it is not in the region of shadows that the savage will look for the great "all-father;" but in the world of solid, tangible realities.
Again, it is assumed that progress in one point is progress in all; that because we surpass all other races and generations in physical science and useful arts, we surpass them in every other way; and that they must be far behind us in ethical and religious conceptions, as they are in inventions and the production of comforts. To find our own theism and morality among savages is therefore impossible; for as the crooked stick is unto the steam-plough, so is the god of the savage unto the God of Great Britain. Yet when we consider how closely religious and ethical principles are intertwined, and how glaringly untrue it is to say that industrial civilization makes for morality,—for purity or self-denial, or justice, or truth, or honour: how manifestly it is accompanied with a deterioration of the higher perceptions and tastes, we must surely pause before taking it for granted that the course of true religion has been running smoothly parallel to that of commerce.
In a thoughtful essay, entitled The Disenchantment of France, Mr. F.W. Myers points out the goal towards which "progress" is leading us, through the destruction of those four "illusions" which formerly gave life all its value and dignity,—namely, belief in religion; devotion to the State—whether to the prince or to the people; belief in the eternity and spirituality of human love; belief in man's freedom and imperishable personal unity. "I cannot avoid the conclusion," he says, "that we are bound to be prepared for the worst. Yet by the worst I do not mean any catastrophe of despair, any cosmic suicide, any world-wide unchaining of the brute that lies pent in man. I mean merely the peaceful, progressive, orderly triumph of l'homme sensuel moyen; the gradual adaptation of hopes and occupations to a purely terrestrial standard; the calculated pleasures of the cynic who is resolved to be a dupe no more."
In other words, if we accept this very temperate and reluctant conclusion, we must confess that the one-sided progress, with whose all-sufficiency we are so thoroughly satisfied, is making straight for the extermination, not only of religion, but of morality in any received sense of the term.
But when Mr. Lang, who has no hypothesis of his own as to the origin of belief in God, brings the animistic theory to an à posteriori test, he finds it encumbered with still greater difficulties; for nothing is as, à priori, it ought to be.
While Mr. Tylor asserts "that no savage tribe of monotheists has ever been known," but that all ascribe the attributes of deity to other beings than the Almighty Creator, it appears in fact that many of the rudest savages "are as monotheistic as some Christians. They have a Supreme Being, and the 'distinctive attributes of deity' are not by them assigned to other beings further than as Christianity assigns them to angels, saints, the devil," &c. Catholics at least will readily understand how hastily and unjustly the charge of polytheism is made by the protestantized mind against any religion which believes in a Heavenly Court as well as in a Heavenly Monarch. "Of the existence of a belief in a Supreme Being" amongst the lowest savages, "there is as good evidence as we possess for any fact in the ethnographic region. It is certain that savages, when first approached by curious travellers and missionaries, have again and again recognized our God in theirs."
If, therefore, belief in God grew out of belief in ghosts, it must have been in some stage of culture lower than any of which we have experience so far; and at some period which belongs to the region of hypothesis and conjecture. There are no known tribes where ghosts are worshipped and God is not known, or where the supposed process of development can be watched in action. Nor is it only that links are missing, but one of the very terms to be connected, namely, a godless race, is conjectural. Still more unfortunate is it for the animists that evidence points to the fact that advance in civilization often means the decay of monotheism, and that the ruder races are the purer in their religious and ethical conceptions. Once more, all facts are against the theory that tribes transfer their earthly polity to the heavenly city; for monotheism is found where monarchy is unknown. "God cannot be a reflection from human kings where there are no kings; nor a president elected out of a polytheistic society of gods, where there is as yet no polytheism; nor an ideal first ancestor where men do not worship their ancestors." To the substantiating of these facts Mr. Lang then applies himself, and shows us how among the Australians, Red Indians, Figians, Andamanese, Dinkas, Yao, Zulus, and all known savages there lives the conception of a Supreme Being (not necessarily spirit) who is variously styled Father, Master, Our Father, The Ancient One in the skyland, The Great Father. He shows us, moreover, that this deity is the God of conscience, a power making for goodness, a guardian and enforcer of the interests of justice and truth and purity; good to the good, and froward with the froward.
But surely, it will be said, all this is too paradoxical, too violently in conflict with what is notorious concerning the religion and morality of savages.
The reason of this seeming contradiction is, however, not altogether difficult. It is to be found partly in the fact that religion, like morality, being counter to those laws which govern the physical world and the animal man,—to the law of egoism and competition and struggle for existence; to the law that "might is right,"—tends from the very nature of the case towards decay and disintegration. The movement of material progress is in some sense a downhill movement. No doubt it evokes much seeming virtue, such as is necessary to secure the end; but the motive force is one with regard to which man is passive rather than active, a slave rather than a master, as a miser is in respect to that passion which stimulates him to struggle for gain. Religion and morality are uphill work, needing continual strain and attention if the motive force is to be maintained at all. Huxley, in one of his later utterances, allowed this with regard to morality; and it is not less but more true with regard to faith in the value of unseen realities. Even if belief in a moral God be as natural to man as are the promptings of conscience, it ought not to surprise us that it should be as universally stifled, neglected, seemingly denied, as conscience is. It is not usually in old age and after years of conflict with the world that conscience is most sensitive and faithful to light, but rather in early childhood. And similarly the sense of God and of His will is apparently more strong and lively in the childhood of races than after it has been stifled by the struggle for wealth and pre-eminence—
When yet I had not walked above
A mile or two from my first love:
But felt through all this fleshly dress
Bright shoots of everlastingness. [2]