While this anthropomorphic tendency, or rather necessity, is manifested by themselves with sufficient grossness—a grossness that is offensive to those more advanced—Christians are indignant at the still grosser manifestations of it seen among uncivilized men. Certainly, such conceptions as those of some Polynesians, who believe that their gods feed on the souls of the dead, or as those of the Greeks, who ascribed to the personages of their Pantheon every vice, from domestic cannibalism downward, are repulsive enough. But if, ceasing to regard these notions from the outside, we more philosophically regard them from the inside—if we consider how they looked to believers, and observe the relationships they bore to the natures and needs of such; we shall begin to think of them with some tolerance. The question to be answered is, whether these beliefs were beneficent in their effects on those who held them; not whether they would be beneficent for us, or for perfect men; and to this question the answer must be that while absolutely bad, they were relatively good.
For is it not obvious that the savage man will be most effectually controlled by his fears of a savage deity? Must it not happen, that if his nature requires great restraint, the supposed consequences of transgression, to be a check upon him, must be proportionately terrible; and for these to be proportionately terrible, must not his god be conceived as proportionately cruel and revengeful? Is it not well that the treacherous, thievish, lying Hindoo should believe in a hell where the wicked are boiled in cauldrons, rolled down mountains bristling with knives, and sawn asunder between flaming iron posts? And that there may be provided such a hell, is it not needful that he should believe in a divinity delighting in human immolations and the self-torture of fakirs? Does it not seem clear that during the earlier ages in Christendom, when men's feelings were so hard that a holy father could describe one of the delights of heaven to be the contemplation of the torments of the damned—does it not seem clear that while the general nature was so unsympathetic, there needed, to keep men in order, all the prospective tortures described by Dante, and a deity implacable enough to inflict them?
And if, as we thus see, it is well for the savage man to believe in a savage god, then we may also see the great usefulness of this anthropomorphic tendency; or, as before said, necessity. We have in it another illustration of that essential beneficence of things visible everywhere throughout nature. From this inability under which we labour to conceive of a deity save as some idealization of ourselves, it inevitably results that in each age, among each people, and to a great extent in each individual, there must arise just that conception of deity best adapted to the needs of the case. If, being violent and bloodthirsty, the nature be one calling for stringent control, it evolves the idea of a ruler still more violent and bloodthirsty, and fitted to afford this control. When, by ages of social discipline, the nature has been partially humanized, and the degree of restraint required has become less, the diabolical characteristics before ascribed to the deity cease to be so predominant in the conception of him. And gradually, as all need for restraint disappears, this conception approximates towards that of a purely beneficent necessity. Thus, man's constitution is in this, as in other respects, self-adjusting, self-balancing. The mind itself evolves a compensating check to its own movements; varying always in proportion to the requirement. Its centrifugal and its centripetal forces are necessarily in correspondence, because the one generates the other. And so we find that the forms of both religious and secular rule follow the same law. As an ill-controlled national character produces a despotic terrestrial government, so also does it produce a despotic celestial government—the one acting through the senses, the other through the imagination; and in the converse case the same relationship holds good.
Organic as this relationship is in its origin, no artificial interference can permanently affect it. Whatever perturbations an external agency may seem to produce, they are soon neutralized in fact, if not in appearance. I was recently struck with this in reading a missionary account of the "gracious visitations of the Holy Spirit at Vewa," one of the Feejee islands. Describing a "penitent meeting," the account says:—
"Certainly the feelings of the Vewa people were not ordinary. They literally roared for hours together for the disquietude of their souls. This frequently terminated in fainting from exhaustion, which was the only respite some of them had till they found peace. They no sooner recovered their consciousness than they prayed themselves first into an agony, then again into a state of entire insensibility."
Now these Feejee islanders are the most savage of all the uncivilized races. They are given to cannibalism, infanticide, and human sacrifices; they are so bloodthirsty and so treacherous, that members of the same family dare not trust each other; and, in harmony with these characteristics, they have for their aboriginal god, a serpent. Is it not clear then, that these violent emotions which the missionaries describe, these terrors and agonies of despair which they rejoiced over, were nothing but the worship of the old god under a new name? Is it not clear that these Feejees had simply understood those parts of the Christian creed which agree in spirit with their own—the vengeance, the perpetual torments, the diabolism of it; that these, harmonizing with their natural conceptions of divine rule, were realized by them with extreme vividness; and that the extremity of the fear which made them "literally roar for hours together," arose from the fact that while they could fully take in and believe the punitive element, the merciful one was beyond their comprehension? This is the obvious inference. And it carries with it the further one, that in essence their new belief was merely their old one under a new form—the same substantial conception with a different history and different names.
However great, therefore, may be the seeming change adventitiously produced in a people's religion, the anthropomorphic tendency prevents it from being other than a superficial change—insures such modifications of the new religion as to give it all the potency of the old one—obscures whatever higher elements there may be in it until the people have reached the capability of being acted upon by them: and so, re-establishes the equilibrium between the impulses and the control they need. If any one requires detailed illustrations of this, he will find them in abundance in the history of the modifications of Christianity throughout Europe.
Ceasing then to regard heathen theologies from the personal point of view, and considering them solely with reference to the function they fulfil where they are indigenous, we must recognise them in common with all theologies, as good for their time and places; and this mental necessity which disables us from conceiving a deity save as some idealization of ourselves, we must recognise as the agency by which harmony is produced and maintained between every phase of human character and its religious creed.