Degradation may almost be considered a law of religion and morality which needs some kind of violent counteraction, some continual intervention and providence, if it is to be kept in check. After all, this is only a dressing-up of the old platitude that a holy life means continual warfare and straining of the spirit against the flesh, of the moral order against the physical order, of altruism or the true egoism against selfishness or the false egoism. Of course an ideal civilization would help and not hinder religion; but the chances against civilization being ideal are so large as to make it historically true that, advance in civilization does not always mean advance in religion and morality, and often means decay.
Far from animism being the root of theism, more often it is rather the ivy that grows up about it, hides it and chokes it. Just because the demands of religion and morality are so burdensome to men, they will ever seek short-cuts to salvation; and the intercession of presumably corruptible courtiers will be secured to win the favour, or avert the displeasure, of the rigorously incorruptible and inexorable King, who is "no respecter of persons." Except among Jews and Christians, the Supreme Being is nowhere worshipped with sacrifice—that service of food-offering being reserved for subordinate deities susceptible to gentle bribery. The great God of conscience is naturally the least popular object of cultus; though, were the animists right, He should be the most popular, seeing He would be the latest development demanded and created by the popular mind. But contrariwise, He tends to recede more and more into the background, behind the ever-multiplying crowd of patron-spirits, guardians, family-gods; till, as in Greece and Rome, He is almost entirely obscured, "an unknown God ignorantly worshipped"—the End, as usual, being forgotten and buried in the means. All this process of degradation will be hastened by the corruption of priests whose avarice or ambition, as Mr. Lang says, will tempt them to exploit the lucrative elements in religion at the expense of the ethical; to whittle-away the decrees of God and conscience to suit the wealthy and easy-going; to substitute purchasable sacrifice, for obedience; and the fat of rams, for charity. We need only look to the history of Israel and of the Christian Church to see all these tendencies continually at work, and only held in check by innumerable interventions of Divine Providence, and of that Spirit which is always striving with man.
Scant, however, as may be the amount of direct worship accorded to the Supreme God, compared with that received by subordinate spiritual powers, yet it is sui generis, and of an infinitely higher order. The familiar distinction of latria and dulia seems to obtain everywhere; as also that between Elohim and Javeh, that is, between supernal beings in general, and the Supreme Being who is also supernal. Yet so excessive in quantity is the secondary cultus compared with the primary, that an outsider may well be pardoned for thinking that there is nothing beyond what meets the eye on every side. As has been said, the Supreme Being alone is usually considered above the weakness of caring for sacrifice, or for external worship in "temples made with hands." His name is commonly tabooed, only to be whispered in those mysteries of initiation which are met with so universally. Outside these mysteries He may only be spoken of in parables and myths, grotesque, irreverent, designed to conceal rather than to reveal. But rarely is there an image or an altar to this unknown God.
It is easy for those who recognize no other religion among savages behind the popular observances and cults which are so much to the front, to believe that early religion is non-ethical. For indeed, for the most part, all this secondary cultus is directed to the mitigation of the moral code and the substitution of exterior for interior sacrifice. It is the result of an endeavour to compound with conscience; and to hide away sins from the all-seeing eye. Again it is chiefly in the secrecy of the mysteries that the higher ethical doctrine is propounded—a doctrine usually covering all the substantials of the decalogue; and in some cases, approaching the Christian summary of the same under the one heading of love and unselfishness. As for the corrupt lives of savages, if it proves their religion to be non-ethical, what should we have to think of Christianity? We cry out in horror against cannibalism as the ne plus ultra of wickedness., but except so far as it involves murder, it is hard to find in it more than a violation of our own convention, while a mystical mind might find more to say for it than for cremation. Certainly it is not so bad as slander and backbiting. Human sacrifice offered to the Lord of life and death at His own behest, is something that did not seem wicked and inconceivable to Abraham. Head-hunting is not a pretty game; nor is scalping and mutilation the most generous treatment of a fallen foe; yet war has seen worse things done by those who professed an ethical religion.
But, chief among the causes why savage religion has been so misrepresented, is the almost universal co-existence of a popularized form of religion addressed to the imagination, with that which speaks to the understanding alone. As has already been said, man's imagination is at war with his intelligence when supersensible realities, such as God and the soul, are in question. Without figures we cannot think; yet the timeless and spaceless world can ill be figured after the likeness of things limited by time and space. This mental law is the secret of the invariable association of mythology with religion. Setting aside the problem as to how the truths of natural religion (sc. that there is a God the rewarder of them that seek Him) are first brought home to man, it is certain that if he does not receive them embedded in history or parable, in spoken or enacted symbolism, he will soon fix and record them in some such language for himself. Christ recognized the necessity of speaking to the multitude in parables, not attempting to precise or define the indefinable; but contenting Himself with: "The Kingdom of Heaven is like," &c. "I am content," says Sir Thomas Browne, "to understand a mystery without a rigid definition, in an easie and Platonick description," and it is only through such easie and Platonick descriptions that spiritual truth can slowly be filtered into the popular mind. Still when we consider how prone all metaphors are to be pressed inexactly, either too far, or else not far enough, how abundant a source they are of misapprehension, owing to the curiosity that will not be content to have the gold in the ore, but must needs vainly strive to refine it out, we can well understand how mythology tends to corrupt and debase religion if it be not continually watched and weeded; and how, being, from the nature of the case, ever to the front, ever on men's lips and mingling with their lives, it should seem to the outsider to be not the imperfect garment of religion, but a substitute for it. Yet in some sense these mythologies are a safeguard of reverence in that they provide a theme for humour and profanity and rough handling, which is thus expended, not on the sacred realities themselves, but on their shadows and images. Among certain savages God's personal name is too holy to be breathed but in mysteries; yet His mythological substitute is represented to be as grotesque, freakish, and immoral as the Zeus of the populace. We can hardly enter into such a frame of mind, though possibly the irreverences and buffooneries of some of the miracle-plays of the middle ages are similarly to be explained as the rebound from the strain incident to a continual sense of the nearness of the supernatural; and perhaps the Messer Domeniddio of the Florentines stood rather for a mental effigy that might be played with, than for the reasoned conception of the dread Deity. If we possessed a minutely elaborated history of the Good Shepherd and His adventures, or of the Prodigal's father, or of the Good Samaritan, interspersed with all manner of ludicrous and profane incidents, and losing sight of the original purport of the figure, we should have something like a mythology. Were it not stereotyped as part of an inspired record, the mere romancing tendency of the imagination would easily have added continually to the original parable, wholly forgetful of its spiritual significance.
It is part of the very economy of the Incarnation to meet this weakness, to provide for this want of the human mind; to satisfy the imagination as well as the intelligence. Here Divine truth has received a Divine embodiment, has been set forth in the language of deeds, in a real and not in a fictitious history. Sacrifice and sacrament, and every kind of natural religious symbolism, has been appropriated and consecrated to the service of truth and to the fullest utterance of God that such weak accents will stretch to. Here the channel of communication between Heaven and earth is not of man's creation but of God's; or at least is of God's composition. This is the great difference between the ethnic religions and a religion that professes to be revealed—that is, spoken by God and put into language by Him. The latter is, so to say, cased in an incorruptible body, its very expression being chosen and sealed for ever with Divine approval, and rescued from the fluent and unstable condition of religions whose clothes are the works of men's hands. Here it is that Catholic Christianity stands out as altogether catholic and human, adapted as it is to the world-wide cravings of the religious instinct; satisfying the imagination and the emotions, no less than the intellect and the will; and yet saving us from the perils of the myth-making tendency of our mind.
The same thought is pressed upon us when we view the collective evidence as to the universal demand for a mediatorial system—for intercessors, and patrons, for a heavenly court surrounding the Heavenly Monarch; a demand often created by and tending to a degradation of purer religion, yet most surely embodying and expressing a spiritual instinct which is only fully explained and satisfied by the Catholic doctrine of the communion of saints and souls in one great society, labouring for a conjoint salvation and beatitude. We Catholics know well enough that the degraded and superstitious will pervert saint-worship as they pervert other good things to their own hurt and to God's dishonour, but we also know that of itself the doctrine of the Heavenly Court is altogether in the interests of the very highest and purest religion. In all this matter, needless to say, Mr. Lang is not with us; but the affinities of Catholicism with universal religion, which he marks to our prejudice, are really in some sort proof of our contention that the Church is the divinely conceived fulfilment of all man's natural religious instincts, providing harmless and healthy outlets for humours otherwise dangerous and morbid; never forgetful of man's double nature and its claims, neither wearying him with an impossible intellectualism—a religion of pure philosophy—not suffering him to be the prey of mere imagination and sentiment, but tempering the divine and human, the thought and the word, so as to bring all his faculties under the yoke of Christ.
Mr. Lang's concern is with the universality of belief in God the Rewarder, not with its origin nor even its value; though he seems at times to imply that the solution may be found in a primitive revelation of some sort. For ourselves, accordant as such a notion would be with popular Christian tradition, we do not think that the adduced evidence needs that hypothesis; but is explained sufficiently by "the hypothesis of St. Paul," which, as Mr. Lang admits, "seem not the most unsatisfactory." The mere verbal tradition of a primitive "deposit" not committed to any authorized guardians would, to say the least, be a hazardous and conjectural way of accounting for the facts; nor is there any evidence offered to show that such religious beliefs are held, as the Catholic religion is, on the authority of antiquity, interpreted by a living voice. The substance of this elementary religion—the existence of God the Rewarder of them that seek Him—is naturally suggested to the simple-minded by the data of unspoilt conscience, confirmed and supplemented by the spectacle of Nature. That the truth would be borne-in on a solitary and isolated soul we need not maintain; for in solitude and isolation man is not man, and neither reason nor language can develop aright. Further we may allow that as Nature or God provides for society, and therefore for individuals, by an equal distribution of gifts and talents, giving some to be politicians, others poets, others philosophers, others inventors, so He gives to some what might be called natural religious genius or talent or spiritual insight, for the benefit of the community. Thus whatever be true of the individual savage, we cannot well suppose that any tribe or people, taken collectively, should fail to draw the fundamental truths of religion from the data of conscience and nature. In this sense no doubt they would become traditional—the common property of all—so that the innate facility of each individual mind in regard to them would be stimulated and supplemented by suggestion from without.
How far God can be said actually to "speak" to the soul through conscience or through Nature so as to make faith, in the strict sense of reliance on the word of another, possible, is for theologians to discuss. If besides expressing these truths in creation or in conscience, He also expresses in some way His intention to reveal them to the particular soul, we have all that is requisite. In what way, or innumerable ways He makes His voice heard in every human heart day by day, and causes general truths to be brought near and recognized and received as a particular message, each can answer best for himself.
But undoubtedly the results of comparative religion are, so far, almost entirely favourable to the doctrine of God's all-saving will; and in many other points confirmatory of received beliefs. Even where, for example, in the question of the origin and meaning of sacrifice, they seem to necessitate a modification of the somewhat elaborate à priori definition, popular in some modern schools (though not in them all), yet that modification is altogether favourable to the sounder conception of the Eucharistic Sacrifice as a food-offering complementary to the Sacrifice of the Cross. Above all it is in bringing out the unity of type between natural ethnic religions, and that revealed Catholic religion which is their correction and fulfilment, that the studies of Mr. Lang and Mr. Jevons are of such service. The militant Protestant delights to dwell on the analogies between Romanism and Paganism; we too may dwell on them with delight, as evidence of that substantial unity of the human mind which underlies all surface diversities of mode and language, and binds together, as children of one family, all who believe in God the Rewarder of them that seek Him, who is no respecter of persons. What man in his darkness and sinfulness has feebly been trying to utter in every nation from the beginning, that God has formulated and written down for him in the great Catholic religion of the Word made Flesh—