Again you will excuse me if I use here a very familiar illustration to make the leading thought of polytheism understood.
You know that in fairy tales the fairies are always called in to the festival at the baptism of the infant child. The intention is to invite them all, but there is always one forgotten; and that one curses the child in some way or other; and then all the gifts of all the good fairies cannot prevent the child from suffering, at least for a time, from the bad will of the one that has been forgotten. This involves the essential idea of polytheists. They had always the thought that all the good gods whom they worshipped could not prevent any malevolent one who had been neglected from hurting them; and they were always in search of that one. They were always making altars "to the unknown god or gods," to be certain in that way to include them all. They were constantly asking what gods were worshipped in such a country, in such a place; and if it was a god that was not known among them, straightway they prepared a place for his worship. They said, "He has no existence, very likely; but if he has, if he lives, then we must sacrifice to him, to prevent his spoiling the happiness that the other good gods wish to give us." So there was an incessant adding to the immense number of gods. At the time of Christ, they had so many of them that, from the time a grain of corn was put into the ground to the time the harvest commenced, they had nine different deities who in succession took charge of the corn that had been put into the ground, and thus it passed from one god to another. Nine of them were necessary while the grain was in the ground. Thus, when the heathen became Christians, they had been in the constant habit of adding gods to their heaven, of adding good men to their gods, and also men not good, but whom they feared,—for all the emperors were made gods the moment they died, so that one of them, who was rather a wit, when he was dying said, "I feel that I am becoming a god." The heathen had become so habituated to this that, when they became Christians, they continued very naturally to multiply the number of the objects of worship. They soon ceased to make the slightest difference between Christ and the Father. In good time they unconsciously put Mary, the mother of Christ, above Christ; now, without ever having this intention, they put, in fact, Mary above the Father. And so on, adding always a new god to a new worship, and always making the new worship as binding and as efficacious as possible, to satisfy that polytheistic craving. They did not understand their error in keeping between the infinite God and themselves an immense number of minor deities. This craving was unwholesome, but very sincere. That unconscious wish to multiply gods and make saints has continued to this day; and no pope has canonized so many saints as the present one, who is always trying to show that he does more in this way than any of his predecessors.
This will suffice to give you an idea of what the old spirit of Rome was, the whole tendency of the Roman mind, and what was brought by them into the church. I must now ask you to go in imagination with me to the tomb of one of those old Romans, who were not burned, according to the custom of that period, say the Scipios. Suppose one of the Scipios taken out of his tomb; and bring him into a Roman Catholic Church: do you think he will be very much astonished? He will be astonished at one thing,—by the crucifix, the image of the crucified Son of God. That was completely contrary to the Roman ideal and their habit of thought. But all the other things he will see will not astonish him at all. He had seen them all his life in his own time. You believe, perhaps, that the shape of a Roman Catholic Church at Rome will astonish a pagan? Not at all. Cato had given the Romans the pleasure of enjoying, for the first time, a portico with three ranges of columns, the middle aisle being broader than the others; and at the end was what we call an apse, but the ancients a conch. The end was rounded off, and thrown into the form of a semi-circle, and the tribunal for the prætor or judge was placed in that half-circle at the end. This portico was called a stoa basilica, and the first Roman Christian churches were built on that plan. Afterwards, the idea came of making the church in the shape of a cross; and then a smaller basilica was placed across the other, forming the transept of the church. But those long ranges of columns remained, with the same wide space in the middle, and narrower aisles on either side. The basilica was the form of public buildings most in fashion in Rome at that time. There the gothic style was never popular. Even now, of four or five hundred churches in Rome, only one, the Minerva, is gothic. When Christian architecture was born, Christian architecture accepted the heathen plan.
In the new church, in that basilica, what do we find? We find holy water at the door. That was exactly what you found in the pagan temple, only it was called lustral water. In the temple, my Scipio, who goes with me, recognizes all his old habits of thought, all the old emblems of his religious devotion. He sees a number of statues, or images; but he has seen those all his life. There is not only a central shrine, but there are small chapels. The saints have a golden circle round their heads: Christians call it the aura, the ancients called it the nimbus; but it was exactly the same thing. They had it around the heads of their deities in painting and sculpture, and so on. There are censers and there are tapers burning there; and there are all the ornaments a pagan was accustomed to see in his temple. All those things had been kept, had been re-established, and the pagans had brought them with them into the Catholic churches. When I went for the first time to Naples, the man who showed me the museum there showed me feet, legs, and arms, hands, eyes, and ears, in stone. He said, "These are ex voto." People who were ill gave to some of the gods, the ones they chose, these things as marks of gratitude for having been cured. The cicerone told me, "You see, sir, it is exactly the same thing we have in our churches." And so it is. In all the churches in Naples and Rome, and in the Roman Catholic churches all over Spain and France, you see, in wax, in gold, in silver, and in stone, such legs and arms, eyes and ears. It is exactly the same thing. The heathen man said to his god, "I will pay you by this mark of honor and gratitude, by this mark of your power and your glory, if you cure me." The Roman Catholic says exactly the same thing to a saint, to the Virgin, sometimes to Jesus, and very rarely to God.
I cannot mention here all the other details, like funeral services at the end of the year, like funeral chapels, like many other institutions that exist in the Roman Catholic Church, that are practised every day in it, and that are exactly the same, so far as religious ideas go, as were practised in the pagan churches. But I must add something of more consequence than that, about the worship of human beings, and especially of the worship of the Virgin Mary. It was nothing new to the Pagans to worship a woman, and especially to worship a virgin. That was one of the ideas the most familiar to their devotion. In Rome they had the temple of Hestia or Vesta, who was supposed to be a virgin; and she had around her nuns who were pledged to live in celibacy, and punished by death if they did not remain true to their vow. In Greece it was the same thing with Pallas. Perhaps you all know that in Athens, the largest, most perfect, and most beautiful of the Greek temples—immensely superior to any edifice I ever saw in any country—is called the Parthenon, which means the Virgin Temple. That temple is the temple of Pallas,—Athene, or Minerva,—who was the principal deity of Athens. Thus that idea was perfectly familiar to them, and they only kept it, and brought it with them into Christianity.
I have spoken of monks. You must not believe that the monks are by any means a Roman Catholic invention. In the East there have been monks in all times and in all religions. It seems to have been a special habit or taste of the people of the East to give some men no other business, no other work to do, but to live in solitude, and pray for them; and some men have always, in those very hot countries, where it is exceedingly tiresome to work, liked to live in perpetual prayer better than any other more fatiguing labor. We find the monk in all times and countries in the East, then in the West; and he has been imported from paganism into Christianity, like all the rest. I do not believe there is a religion more completely contrary to the monastic feeling than the religion of Christ. I do not think there was ever a type more radically contrary to the type of the monk, than the figure of Christ as we find it in the Bible. However, that old monkish spirit of the Orient was always known to the Romans from the beginning; for they had priests and monks from the time their city began. That spirit has, like other things, been smuggled into the Church, though it was contrary to the spirit of Christianity.
I must recall one last rite of great importance. Both the old Romans and the old Jews had, as a principal part of their worship, the rite of sacrifice. The origin of it was simply this: that men in the first place possessed nothing but flocks, and they gave to God one head of their flock, one sheep, or one bull, as being the only riches they had to give. Before they had houses, before they had garments, before they had any other thing,—money they were very far from having,—men had to eat, and they had flocks because they wanted to have meat to eat; and thus they gave to God the only necessity of life to them, the only thing they understood the importance of. And they gave him the whole animal, not reserving to themselves any part of it, in some cases; in other cases, a part of it only, making a meal of the rest for themselves. To give a part to God was one essential element of their worship, the rite of sacrifice; and we find that the rite grew out of that, and nothing else. It was a habit deeply rooted in the Roman mind, and at the same time already familiar to the Jews; and when those Christians who had been Jews spoke of Christ to the Romans, they could not prevent that Roman or Jewish habit from taking double force, and double space in religion. What happened? It happened that the old Romans and old Jews wanted a sacrifice; wanted to give something to God; wanted a victim; and then came this strange fact, very easy to understand however, of which we find traces in the first days of Christianity,—that there was no better victim to offer to God than Christ. When they had identified completely Christ with the Father, then there was no greater victim to offer to God than God himself. Therefore, they had a sacrifice that is called "the mass." You know the official name is "sacrifice of the mass." It consists in this. The priest takes the host, which is merely bread,—it is nothing but a little flour and water, made into bread,—he pronounces the consecrating words; then, after he pronounces them, there is no bread, there is no flour; instead of the bread, instead of the flour, there is Jesus Christ. According to the Council of Trent, that is Jesus Christ, his body, his blood, his soul, and his divinity; it is Jesus Christ; is perfect God. And this has been, by an old Roman Catholic writer, very clearly expressed in these three words: "The priest, what is he? what does he do? Creatus Creatorem creat." He is a creature who creates the Creator. After that comes the second great part of the sacrifice of the mass. There is God, and the priest sacrifices God to God. And how? Sacrificat manducando. That is to say, according to the formal explanation, he sacrifices God by eating God. This is the sacrifice of the mass. If the Roman mind had not been accustomed, as I have shown you, to superstition, to all literalism, to the love of the law and the letter, even when the law or the letter was absurd, they would not easily have accepted all this; but with their turn of mind, with their way of taking things, that was exactly what they wished for, and that was what they adopted. Not at once: it was very long in elaborating itself. It was so completely, I cannot say otherwise, so completely absurd, that it required a great deal of time to make it so precise; but they attained to that at last, and they could not but do so. See, then, what a man the priest is. He has before him bread, and he makes God; he afterwards sacrifices God; he is almost a God himself. At the moment when he makes God, he seems to be superior to God; at the moment when he sacrifices God, by eating him, he seems superior to God. Thence comes the immense power of the priesthood, of priestcraft. And as if this were not enough, in the mass, as you know, the priest has not only the host, but he has the wine, the cup. The other members of the church have not the cup, because they must not be equal to the priest even in the communion; even in the act of uniting themselves with God. Laymen cannot arrive at the height of glory to which the priest arrives; they must eat the host when it is given to them, but they cannot touch the cup; that is reserved to the priest, a sort of heavenly, or divine, or godlike character. Even as the Romans had respected their old bridge-makers, their old pontifices, their old priests, whom they considered the bulwarks of their town, they respected afterwards the priests of the Roman Catholic Church. So the mass was established, with all its consequences.
This is not all. I must explain exactly how a part of the heathenish religion answered, in the time of Jesus, the wants of the heathen better than the more natural religion of the Christians. At the time of Christ, many Romans did not believe in thirty thousand gods and in all the absurd and indecent history of those thirty thousand deities, but they had a form of worship that had become purer and purer. They had what they called "Mysteries." In Greece, and in Rome also, there were "Mysteries." These were ceremonies in which great philosophic and religious lessons were given. There exists a very touching letter from Plutarch to his wife, written at the time he lost his only daughter, and when they were in the deepest affliction and desolation. He writes to his wife, who was separated from him at that time, a very kind and loving letter, trying to give her comfort and hope. He says to her, "Remember the beautiful things we have seen together in the Mysteries of Bacchus." You must not believe, as many would at first believe, that the Mysteries of Bacchus were nothing but drunkenness and disorder: they were something else. They were like the Mysteries of Ceres, the Goddess of Corn, and like the representations, in other cases, of the immortality of the soul. They were a sort of tragedy in which, less by word than by singing, and by acting especially, was shown to men that, when the body is interred in the ground, the soul lives, and the soul shall rise to fulness of life. A grain of wheat hidden in the ground remained hidden there for weeks before coming to life. That was the emblem of the new life of immortality. Now, this teaching, good in itself, true in itself, but given in dramatic images, was at that time the very best, soundest, most human, and most natural part of heathenism. And then it happened that Mysteries were acted, not only in the heathen churches, but in Christian churches; that the history of Christ, that the death of Christ, that the resurrection of Christ, took the place of the resurrection of Proserpine, the daughter of Ceres, who represented wheat and corn; and then Christianity became a sort of subject of sacred myths, sacred plays, that were very devoutly acted, and that kept their title of "Mysteries." As soon as we see something of the dark ages, and what the practice of worship was, we see this same thing. It is going on in all countries in some measure. You may see it in the Roman Catholic churches during Easter week. You may see then that, when Christ dies, all the lights are put out, save one very small light, because that represents the moment when the sky was covered with darkness at his death. And you hear in a choir some persons sing the words of the people who screamed "Crucify him!" and others repeating the words of Caiaphas and the words of Christ. This "Mystery," this serious, devout play, is acted in all Roman Catholic churches. When Christ is dead, the host is taken away from the altar, and it is carried into the tomb, carried into some lower chapel, from which it comes back to the great altar on Easter morning, on the day of the resurrection. That solemn play is going on in all Roman Catholic countries at the present time, and that is a "Mystery." Such is also the "Mystery" that was played in Germany, at Oberammergau (Bavaria), during the last year, and is played there every ten years. It is a devout, religious, serious, dramatic representation of our Lord's suffering, death, and resurrection. The mass in itself was in the beginning a Mystery; it is often called so; it is often called in old Roman Catholic books and often in modern ones the "Mystery of the Mass." It was a representation of the death and sacrifice of Jesus; but the Roman Catholic spirit coming in declared that this Mystery was not, like others, a mere representation, a sacred play, but a reality; and according to the doctrine proclaimed by the Council of Trent, three hundred years ago, the sacrifice of the mass is much more than a representation of Christ's death, of Christ's sacrifice, for he is sacrificed anew, he suffers death really anew. And it has been declared, because some Protestant opponents were astonished at it, that every time any priest says mass,—and every priest must say mass at least once every day,—every time a priest says mass, Christ suffers again, and dies again, sacrificed by the priest for the redemption of human kind. This is the doctrine of the mass, and this gives it a very tragic, grand, and solemn effect in the eyes of those who believe in it. Yet this again is nothing but Roman literalism, the Roman way of taking every thing literally.
Is all this real Christianity? At all events I have said enough, I hope, to give you an idea of the way in which the religion of Jesus of Nazareth, as he was called, preached by him on the hills of Galilee,—a religion that was quite spirit, and quite truth; a religion that had at that time no bleeding, no consecrated man, but that was alive by the Spirit of God in the conscience and in the hearts of men,—how that religion, purely spiritual as it was, became all the pomp, all the exterior complications, all the dramatic intricacies of the Church of Rome.
And here I stop to ask again, Can all this suit the urgent necessities of our times? Is that the truth after which our souls hunger and thirst?