DEVELOPMENT OF THE RELIGIOUS IDEAL.
Religion at first is a gross fetichism, which endows every wonder with a concrete personality. Within every appearance is a several personal cause, and to embody this personal cause in some material form is the first effort of the savage mind. Hence, images are made in representation of these imaginary supernatural powers. Man, of necessity, must clothe these supernatural powers in the elements of some lower form. The imagination cannot grasp an object or an idea beyond the realms of human experience. Unheard-of combinations of character may be made, but the constituent parts must, at some time and in some form, have had an existence in order to be conceivable. It is impossible for the human mind to array in forms of thought anything wholly and absolutely new. This state is the farthest remove possible from a recognition of those universal laws of causation toward which every department of knowledge is now so rapidly tending. Gods are made in the likeness of man and beast, endowed with earthly passions, and a sensual polytheism, in which blind fate is a prominent element, becomes the religious ideal. Religious conceptions are essentially material; all punishments and rewards are such as effect man as a material being; morality, the innate sense of right and wrong, lies stifled, almost dormant.
Thrown wholly upon himself, without experience to guide him, the savage must, of necessity, invest nature with his own qualities, for his mind can grasp none other. But when experience dispels the nearer illusions, objects more remote are made gods; in the sun and stars he sees his controlling destinies; the number of his gods is lessened until at last all merge into one God, the author of all law, the great and only ruler of the universe. In every mythology we see this impersonation of natural phenomena; frost and fire, earth and air and water, in their displays of mysterious powers, are at once deified and humanized. These embodiments of physical force are then naturally formed into families, and their supposed descendants worshiped as children of the gods. Thus, in the childhood of society, when incipient thought takes up its lodgment in old men's brains, shadows of departed heroes mingle with shadows of mysterious nature, and admiration turns to adoration.
Next arises the desire to propitiate these unseen powers, to accomplish which some means of communication must be opened up between man and his deities. Now, as man in his gods reproduces himself, as all his conceptions of supernatural power must, of necessity, be formed on the skeleton of human power, naturally it follows that the strongest and most cunning of the tribe, he upon whom leadership most naturally falls, comes to be regarded as specially favored of the gods. Powers supernatural are joined to powers temporal, and embodied in the chieftain of the nation. A grateful posterity reveres and propitiates departed ancestors. The earlier rulers are made gods, and their descendants lesser divinities; the founder of a dynasty, perhaps, the supreme god, his progeny subordinate deities. The priesthood and kingship thus become united; religion and civil government join forces to press mankind together, and the loose sands of the new strata cohere into the firm rock, that shall one day bear alone the wash of time and tide.
Hence arise divine kingship, and the divine right of kings, and with the desire to win the favor of this divine king, arise the courtesies of society, the first step toward polish of manners. Titles of respect and worship are given him, some of which are subsequently applied to the Deity, while others drop down into the common-place compliments of every-day life.
Here then, we have as one of the first essentials of progress the union of Church and State, of superstition and despotism, a union still necessarily kept up in some of the more backward civilizations. Excessive loyalty and blind faith ever march hand in hand. The very basis of association is credulity, blind loyalty to political powers and blind faith in sacerdotal terrors. In all mythologies at some stage temporal and spiritual government are united, the supernatural power being incarnated in the temporal chief; political despotism and an awful sanguinary religion,—a government and a belief, to disobey which was never so much as thought possible.
See how every one of these primary essentials of civilization becomes, as man advances, a drag upon his progress; see how he now struggles to free himself from what, at the outset, he was led by ways he knew not to endure so patiently. Government, in early stages always strong and despotic, whether monarchical, oligarchical, or republican, holding mankind under the dominion of caste, placing restrictions upon commerce and manufactures, regulating social customs, food, dress,—how men have fought to break loose these bonds! Religion, not that natural cultus instinctive in humanity, the bond of union as well under its most disgusting form of fetichism, as under its latest, loveliest form of Christianity; but those forms and dogmas of sect and creed which stifle thought and fetter intellect,—how men have lived lives of sacrifice and self-denial as well as died for the right to free themselves from unwelcome belief!
RELATION OF GOVERNMENT TO CIVILIZATION.
In primeval ages, government and religion lay lightly on the human race; ethnology, as well as history, discloses the patriarchal as the earliest form of government, and a rude materialism as the earliest religious ideal; these two simple elements, under the form of monsters, became huge abortions, begotten of ignorance, that held the intellect in abject slavery for thousands of years, and from these we, of this generation, more than any other, are granted emancipation. Even wealth, kind giver of grateful leisure, in the guise of avarice becomes a hideous thing, which he who would attain the higher intellectual life, must learn to despise.
Government, as we have seen, is not an essential element of collective humanity. Civilization must first be awakened, must even have passed the primary stages before government appears. Despotism, feudalism, divine kingship, slavery, war, superstition, each marks certain stages of development, and as civilization advances all tend to disappear; and, as in the early history of nations the state antedates the government, so the time may come in the progress of mankind when government will be no longer necessary. Government always grows out of necessity; the intensity of government inevitably following necessity. The form of government is a natural selection; its several phases always the survival of the fittest. When the federalist says to the monarchist, or the monarchist to the federalist: My government is better than yours, it is as if the Eskimo said to the Kaffir: My coat, my house, my food, is better than yours.