No strongly religious man can reason about his own faith. Christians will say that the idea of the True God is inherent in man also, that if not earlier than prayer, it is co-existent. So be it. But how about false gods—the savage praying to a mountain, the Hindu to an image or a stone, representing who knows what? the Buddhist woman praying by the pagoda? Their prayer is beautiful. It is as beautiful as yours. Never doubt it. Go and see them pray. You will learn that prayer is beautiful, is true in itself. And can such a thing proceed from a false theology? See men pray and hear them confess and you will be sure of this, that prayer and confession, no matter by whom, no matter to whom, are always true, have always their effect upon the heart. Whatever is false, they are not. It is one absolute truth that all men will admit.
CHAPTER XXIV.
SUNDAY AND SABBATH.
I am not sure that in such an enquiry as this history is of much avail. I do not find that those who search into the past to write the history of it ever discover much that is of use to-day. It seems to me that in tracing an idea, or a law, or a custom, historians are satisfied with giving an account of its growth or decay as if it were the life of a tree. They do not enquire into the why of things. They will tell you that an idea came, say, from the East and was accepted generally. They do not say why it was accepted. And to have traced a modern belief back into the far past is to them sufficient reason for its presence, forgetful that whatever persists, whether a law or an idea or a belief, does so because it is of use. Living things require a sanction as well as a history, and therein lies their interest. And what I am writing now is of the sanctions of religions.
Still, there is sometimes an interest, if but a negative one, in the history of an observance or belief. It is useful sometimes to trace an observance back, if only to show that the reason generally given for its retention is not and cannot be the real one. Of such is the history of the observance of Sunday, or the Sabbath, in England and Scotland.
We have discovered from the inscriptions at Accad, upon the Euphrates, that in the time of Sargon, 3,800 years B.C., the days were divided into weeks of seven days, named after the sun and moon and the five planets, as they are now in places. And there were, moreover, "Sabbaths" set apart as days of "rest for the soul," "the completion of work." There were five of these Sabbaths in Chaldea every lunar month, occurring on the 7th, the 14th, the 19th, the 21st, and 28th of the month. That is to say, the new moon, the full moon, and the days half way between were Sabbaths, with the addition of a fifth Sabbath on the 19th day. On these days it was not lawful to cook food, to change one's dress, to offer a sacrifice; the king may not speak in public or ride in a chariot, or perform any kind of military or civil duty; even to take medicine was forbidden. It was a day of rest. And this was 3,800 B.C., nearly 2,000 years before Abraham lived, 2,300 years before Moses and the Ten Commandments, almost contemporary, according to the Bible records, with Cain and Abel. The day was already called the Sabbath. It had existed already for no one knows how long, probably thousands of years; it was a day of rest, and it was observed much as was subsequently the Jewish Sabbath. Without doubt the Jews only adopted a custom known to more civilised nations ages before, and they gave to it the sanction of their religion, as they and many other people have done to many matters. There is everywhere a strong tendency, if possible, to give religious sanction to every observance. The stronger emotions attract to themselves the lesser. So have the Jews and Mahommedans adopted sanitary precautions, the Hindus sanitary and marriage laws, and Christianity marriage laws also in their faiths. So did my friend mentioned in the preface include all civilisation in his religion.
The observance of the Sabbath arose not from a religious command transmitted by Moses, but as the result of observation and custom thousands of years before, that a day of rest was needed for man.
When they reached a certain standard of civilisation all peoples seem to have had such a day set apart. It was a want that arose out of the keener struggle for existence, a mutual truce to the war of competition. But the day itself varied. The Greeks divided their lunar month into decades, having thus three festival days in a month. The Romans, we are told, divided it into periods of eight days, though I do not know how they managed their arithmetic or got eight into twenty-nine without some awkward remainder. And in the farther East it was usual to celebrate the full moon and the new moon and the days half way between as days of rest. A lunar month consisting of sometimes twenty-nine and sometimes thirty days, the period between rest days was sometimes six days as in a week, and sometimes seven days. Thus among the Burmese, although there are, as usual, seven days named after the sun, moon, and planets, the rest day goes by the day of the month, not by that of the week, just as it did with the Accadians. For in the East a month remains a month; it is the life of a moon. It begins with the new moon and ends with the fourth quarter, and is easily reckoned by any villager. With us in the North the age of the moon has ceased to be of any importance. Our life after dark is indoors, where we have lights and the moon is of no use to us. Our houses are lit artificially, and very few Europeans could tell at a moment's notice how old the moon is.