But whence arises the necessity for craft and whence the craft? The faculty of invention implies skill. Skill successfully to play upon the instincts of humanity can only be acquired through the medium of like instincts, and although the skill be empirical, the play must be natural. Craft alone will not suffice to satisfy the desire; the hook must be baited with some small element of truth before the most credulous will seize it. If religious beliefs are the fruits of invention, how shall we account for the strange coincidences of thought and worship which prevail throughout all myths and cults? Why is it that all men of every age, in conditions diverse, and in countries widely sundered, are found searching out the same essential facts? All worship; nearly all have their creation-myth, their flood-myth, their theory of origin, of distribution from primitive centres, and of a future state. In this regard as in many another, civilization is but an evolution of savagism; for almost every principle of modern philosophy there may be found in primitive times its parallel.
The nature and order of supernatural conceptions are essentially as follows: The first and rudest form of belief is Fetichism, which invests every phenomenon with an independent personality. In the sunshine, fire, and water, in the wind and rock and stream, in every animal, bird, and plant, there is a separate deity; for every effect there is a cause. Even Kepler, whose intellect could track the planets in their orbits, must needs assume a guiding spirit for every world. It is impossible for the mind to conceive of self-creative or self-existent forces.
In time the personalities of the fetich-worshiper become to some extent generalized. Homogeneous appearances are grouped into classes, and each class referred to a separate deity, and hence Polytheism. Pantheism then comes in and makes all created substance one with the creator; nature and the universe are God. From the impersonating of the forces of nature to the creation of imaginary deities there is but a step. Every virtue and vice, every good and evil becomes a personality, under the direct governance of which lie certain passions and events; and thus in place of one god for many individuals, each individual may have a multitude of his own personal gods. The theogony of Hesiod was but a system of materialized love and hate; while, on the other hand, the gods of Homer, although personating human passions, were likewise endowed with moral perceptions. In them the blind forces of nature are lighted up into a human-divine intelligence.
In Monotheism the distinct personalities, which to the savage underlie every appearance, become wholly generalized, and the origin of all phenomena is referred to one First Cause. The subtle and philosophic Greeks well knew that God to be God must be omnipotent, and omnipotency is indivisible. That the Aztecs could believe and practice the absurdities they did is less an object of wonder, than that the intellectual philosophers of Athens could have tolerated the gods of Homer. Indeed, the religion of the more cultivated Greeks appears to us monstrous, in proportion as they were superior to other men in poetry, art, and philosophy.
THEORIES CONCERNING THE ORIGIN OF WORSHIP.
Comparative mythologists explain the origin of worship by two apparently oppugnant theories. The first is that whatever is seen in nature strange and wonderful, is deemed by primitive man an object worthy of worship. The other is, that upon certain noted individuals are fastened metaphorical names, symbolic of some quality alike in them and in the natural object after which they are called; that this name, which at the first was but the surname of an individual, after its possessor is dead and forgotten, lives, reverts to the plant or animal whence it came, becomes impersonal, and is worshiped by a conservative posterity. In other words, one theory fastens upon natural phenomena, human attributes, and worships nature under covering of those attributes, while the other worships in the natural object only the memory of a dead and forgotten man. I have no doubt that in both of these hypotheses are elements of truth.
In the earlier acts of worship the tendency is to assimilate the object worshiped and the character of the worshiper, and also to assign habitations to deities, behind man's immediate environment. Every people has its heaven and hell; the former most generally located beyond the blue sky, and the latter in the dark interior caves of the earth. Man in nature reproduces himself; invests appearances with attributes analogous to his own. This likeness of the supernatural to the natural, of gods to man, is the first advance from fetichism, but as the intellect advances anthropomorphism declines. As one by one the nearest mysteries are solved by science, the emptiness of superstition becomes apparent, and the wonderless wonder is referred by the waking mind to general laws of causation; but still clinging to its first conceptions it places them on objects more remote. Man fixes his eyes upon the planets, discovers their movements, and fancies their controlling spirit also controls his destiny; and when released by reason from star-worship, as formerly from fetichism, again an advance is made, always nearing the doctrine of universal law.
In one tersely comprehensive sentence Clarke gives the old view of what were called natural religions: "They considered them, in their source, the work of fraud; in their essence, corrupt superstitions; in their doctrines, wholly false; in their moral tendency, absolutely injurious; and in their result, degenerating more and more into greater evil."
PRIESTCRAFT AND PROPITIATION.
And this view seems to him alike uncharitable and unreasonable: "To assume that they are wholly evil is disrespectful to human nature. It supposes man to be the easy and universal dupe of fraud. But these religions do not rest on such a sandy foundation, but on the feeling of dependence, the sense of accountability, the recognition of spiritual realities very near to this world of matter, and the need of looking up and worshiping some unseen power higher and better than ourselves. We shall find them always feeling after God, often finding him. We shall see that in their origin they are not the work of priestcraft, but of human nature; in their essence not superstitions, but religions; in their doctrines true more frequently than false; in their moral tendency good rather than evil. And instead of degenerating toward something worse, they come to prepare the way for something better."