Mohammedanism is another outgrowth from this group of religions. The teachings of the Koran give the institutional and ritual forms to the same three elements distinguished above. God is the identical single God; and Mohammed is His Prophet, as Jesus is the New Prophet of Christendom. The true believer's responsibility entails active warfare upon the heretics, that is, those who do not accept the Koran. The immortal state of Mohammedanism is a very different thing from the heavenly bliss of Christianity, for the promised rewards are such as would appeal to the warm-blooded Southern temperament.
Turning now to Asia, we find in Brahmanism and Buddhism two systems of religion that are related to one another exactly as are Judaism and Christianity. The analogue of the Old Testament is a group of priestly hymnal writings known as the Vedas, which date back to about the fourteenth century before Christ lived. Their objects of worship at first are numerous invisible beings that actuate the things of the world, as in Greek theology, but later one of them assumes preëminence as the all-pervading essence of things,—Brahma. The precepts of Brahmanism enjoined adoration of the unseen powers and of their works, as well as practical rules of human conduct, such as those which divided a man's life into the four periods when he should be successively a student, the head of a family, a counselor, and a religious mendicant who should renounce the world of social activities and human desires. In earlier writings, the immortal state is a kind of heaven, but later it meant simply an absorption into Brahma, the eternal impersonal being.
Buddha was an orthodox Brahman reformer of the sixth century before our present era, just as Jesus was an orthodox Hebrew reformer. The essential creed of Buddha made his religion far more ethical than earlier forms, and placed it on a plane even above Christianity of later centuries. This creed relates to the element of human responsibility particularly, the other two remaining much as they were found by Buddha. According to his teachings, a man rested under an obligation to live nobly in the truest sense, and he acquired merit—karma—or lost it, in proportion to his deserts. At death a human soul is reincarnated, in a lower form of animal or even in a being residing in one of a series of unseen hells, if punishment is due; if a higher state is merited, progress is made through thousands of existences until perfection is rewarded by an eternal fusion with the essence of Brahma. It is because there is no escape from just punishment that Buddhism in its original form is properly denoted more ethical than a religion which teaches that sacrifice of any kind will exempt the sinner from deserved penalties and bring about the bestowal of unearned rewards.
Polytheism is the name given to a religion such as that of the Greeks or Romans, who believed in many gods and spirits of greater and lesser power. These supernatural beings, each in its own sphere, immediately directed the processes of nature and controlled the lives of men. One of them, Zeus, was regarded as the supreme "father of gods and men," who delegated specific duties to others; Ares was the god of battles, Hermes was the messenger, Athena implanted wisdom in the minds of men, and Poseidon ruled the sea. The gods were very human to the Greek mind, living in Olympus as men do upon earth, and even visiting the mortals. Their worship involved propitiatory sacrifices and rites as well as thanksgiving offerings when favors were bestowed. But although they were immortal, they did not allow the immortal souls of human beings to join them in their elysium, but compelled the disembodied shades to wander unhappily among the tombs and about their earthly abodes.
Roman theology and religion comprise almost identical forms of the three fundamental elements. The names are changed, and Zeus becomes Jove, his wife Hera is Juno, Ares is Mars, and Hermes is called Mercury. In all other respects, however, the two systems are as much alike as the Greek and Roman languages and Greek and Roman physique.
The religions of savagery are far less analytical, and much more naïve in their reference of natural happenings to the direct interposition of malevolent and benevolent spirits. Their gods are numerous as in Greek religion, and likewise one of them is usually set up as the superior deity, to be the Tirawa of the Indian, the greater Atua of Polynesia, and the Mumbo Jumbo of a West African negro. There is no centralization of the supernatural powers, as in the Jehovah of Judaism and the still subtler Brahma of the Asian. Then, too, the gods must be concretely materialized for purposes of worship and sacrifice; consequently idols are made, to be regarded as the actual spirits themselves permanently or for the time being, and not viewed as representations of an ideal, like the statues of more advanced peoples. The immortal state is described in low religions in various ways that seem to be determined by what the believer himself most desires. The spirit of an American Indian goes to the happy hunting-grounds, where it mounts a spirit pony and forever pursues the ghosts of bison which it kills with spirit bow and arrows; to provide these necessaries his earthly possessions are laid beside his dead body. The Norseman was conducted to Valhalla and, attended by the Valkyrie as handmaidens, he eternally drank mead from the skull of an enemy and gloried over his mundane prowess in battle. It is unnecessary to expand the foregoing list, because the examples sufficiently represent the various grades of human religions. Regarding them as typical, we can see how universal are the three fundamental ideas with which we are concerned. Every race has its own conception of future bliss, as well as its conception of responsibility to the immortal and supernatural powers of the universe. Whatever may be the actual reality, and however closely the conceptions of one or another religion may approximate to the truth, such reality and approximation are not the subjects of the present discussion. Nor is it our purpose to bring out more explicitly the genetic relationship of one religion to another; the evolution of Buddhism from Brahmanism, the origin of Christianity from Judaism, and the divergent development of the several creeds of Christendom amply illustrate the nature of religious history. It is evolution here as elsewhere and everywhere.
* * * * *
Having distinguished the three general elements of all religions, beyond which everything else is of minor importance, we now turn to the question as to the natural origin of these elements. Clearly they cannot arise independently, for the belief in supernatural and eternal spirits is closely connected with the conception of an immortal soul.
The first is the conception of infinite personalities that later become more or less merged into one supreme being. This begins with the idea of the soul as the human ego, conventionally regarded as something independent of the material body during life and immortal after death. The savage goes to sleep, and in his dreams he goes upon journeys and battles strenuously with other men and with beasts, only to find when he awakes that his body is not fatigued, and that it has not really taken part in the activities of his dream life. His companions about the fire also tell him that this is so, while he is equally sure that his essential self has been doing many things during the interval of sleep. In his dream life he finds himself joined by others whom he knows are dead. He sees again even those whose bodies he may have assisted in eating. His total world very soon comes to have an unseen region which is the abode of ordinarily invisible beings having the forms of men, with whom his own dream person can associate; this unseen sphere is furnished also with ghostly counterparts of the trees and rocks and waters with which he is familiar when he is awake. Before long his soul or ghost or spirit is conceived as something which possesses two qualities: it can be disassociated from his body and enter the spirit-world where it seems to defy all the laws of waking life, for with the quickness of thought it visits neighboring islands as readily as it passes to the next hut; and it possesses immortality, for it is exactly like the persistent spirit-individualities of those who have died before him. The other cause for the development of the conception of gods and God in the mind of the savage is the fact that things have been made which neither he nor any other man can make. He can dig a ditch, and make a house, and fashion a canoe, and build ramparts of earth; but human power has obviously been insufficient to construct rivers and mountains and forests and their denizens. Mankind itself has certainly been made in some way, for it exists. Because the savage cannot conceive of things being made excepting as they are made by the human hand, and because so much confronts him that is beyond the power of human construction, he comes to postulate the existence of man-like, but greater than human, personalities, and as he cannot see them in the light of day, they belong to the spirit-world to which souls go. Imagination sometimes gives human outlines to shadows among the moon-lit trees, so that elves and pixies, nymphs and fairies, become established in the world as the primitive man conceives it. Larger tasks are discharged by more important spirits, and everything natural thus becomes animated by supernatural beings. Thor was the god of thunder; Freia the goddess of spring and vernal awakening; Athena inspired the minds of men. Venus and Aphrodite played their special parts, also. But such powers as these, established by the untutored mind, needed to be accounted for, and so in the more advanced religions Jove and Jupiter were created as the more ultimate causes, in response to intellectual demands. By combining all powers into one, God and Brahma are the results.
Thus in merest outline the conception of the infinite personality works out its evolution. At all times, among primitive and higher religions, the powers are clothed with human forms, and gods are pictured as men endowed with intellects and passions, and motives of vengeance and benignity. Man cannot shape his postulated deities save in such forms, with the possible exception of the most philosophical concept of all, Brahma.