Rita, however, did not establish itself as a permanent conception in Indian theology. Its place was taken by another idea, which still sways the thought and rules the lives of hundreds of millions of believers in India and the Far East, Karma, or the doctrine of the Deed. It is well known that this doctrine does not appear in the Vedic hymns. It is first discussed as a great mystery in the forest-sessions where teachers and students met together, where kings could still instruct Brahmans, and women might speak in debate. In the Brahmana of a Hundred Paths it is summed up in a maxim which was first formulated in connection with ceremonial obligation, but came to have a much wider application: "A man is born into the world that he has made"; to which the Law-books added the warning: "The Deed does not perish."
Man is for ever making his own world. Each act, each word, even each thought, adds something to the spiritual fabric which he is perpetually producing. He cannot escape the results of his own conduct. The values for good or evil mount up from hour to hour, and their issues must be fulfilled. When this conception was carried through the universe, the whole sphere of animated existence was placed under its sway. The life of any single person upon earth was only an incident in a chain of lives, stretching into the distant past as well as into the immeasurable future. His condition hereafter would be determined by what he had done before he entered the state that would match his deed. Then his condition here was also determined by what he had wrought in a previous lot. His personal qualities, his health and sickness, his caste and rank, his wealth or poverty, all precisely matched some elements in the moral product of his past. These were, of course, never all precisely of one kind. They were of mingled good and evil, and each of these would in course of time have its appropriate consequence of joy and pain. For every shade of guilt there was a fitting punishment, exactly adjusted in severity and duration, either in degradation and suffering upon earth, or in some one of numerous hells below. And similarly all good was sure of its reward, as happiness and prosperity awaited it here, or were allotted in still richer measure for their due periods in the heavens that rose tier above tier beyond the sky.
The doctrine of Transmigration has appeared in various forms, in very different cultures. But nowhere has it swayed whole civilisations as it has done in the East. It has expressed for innumerable multitudes the essential bond of morals and religion. There were not wanting, indeed, teachers who criticised and rejected it when Gotama the Buddha passed to and fro five hundred years before our era. But while he repudiated the authority of the Vedas, the ceremonies of sacrifice, the claims of the Brahmans, and the immortality of the gods, he retained the doctrine of Karma at the very core of the system of ethical culture which he offered as the way out of the weary circle of re-birth. The whole meaning of the universe, its cosmic periods of dissolution and evolution, was still moral; and the scene of our existence came once more into being that the unexhausted potencies of countless products of the Deed from the lowest hell to the topmost heaven might realise their suspended energy. And when Buddhism became a religion through the interpretation of the person of its founder in terms of the Absolute and Eternal, this law of the phenomenal world of space and time remained beyond even his power to set aside or change.
The ethical element necessarily varies in richness of content and intensity of feeling in different religions. In the classifications which have been from time to time proposed, attention has often been fixed upon its presence as the marked characteristic of a group. Thus Prof. Tiele, of Leiden, proposed to treat the higher religions of Revelation under two heads: (1) religions embodying a sacred law, and forming national communities, including Taoism, Confucianism, Brahmanism, Jainism, Mazdaism, Mosaism, Judaism, and (2) universalistic communions, Buddhism, Christianity, and to some extent Islam. Another writer forms a class of Morality-Religions above the savage Nature-Religions, and reckons in it the religions of Mexico and Peru, the earliest Babylonian (often called Akkadian), Egyptian, Chinese, Hindu, Persian, German, Roman, Greek. All such classifications are exposed to many difficulties, but they at least bear witness to the significance of the place which is occupied by morality in modern estimates of the worth of great historic faiths. The aspects of any particular development are so manifold, that any attempt to establish a scale of rank at once lays itself open to criticism. Where, for example, is Greece in Prof. Tiele's scheme? It is thrown back into the group of "half-ethical anthropomorphic polytheisms." But in the hands of poets and philosophers, the really shaping powers of Hellenic culture, polytheism was left far behind, and on the third of the questions suggested above in considering the relations of morality and religion (p. [208])—their attitude to ritual obligation—Greek official teaching sometimes reached the loftiest heights.
For not only did philosophical and religious communities like the Pythagoreans enunciate such maxims as these: "Purity of soul is the only divine service," or "God has no place on earth more akin to his nature than the pure soul," but the oracle of Delphi itself was supposed to have affirmed the worthlessness of ceremonial cleansing without corresponding holiness of heart. Dr. Farnell translates two utterances ascribed to the Pythia as follows: "O stranger, if holy of soul, enter the shrine of the holy God, having but touched the lustral water: lustration is an easy matter for the good; but all ocean with its streams cannot cleanse the evil man"; and again: "The temples of the gods are open to all good men, nor is there any need of purification; no stain can ever cleave to virtue. But depart, whosoever is baneful at heart; for thy soul will never be washed by the cleansing of the body." Over the sanctuary of Æsculapius at Epidaurus, where so many sufferers thronged for cure (p. [180]), ran the inscription quoted by Porphyry—
"Into an odorous temple he who goes
Should pure and holy be; but to be wise
In what makes holiness is to be pure."
The religion of Zarathustra, on the other hand, did not maintain its primitive elevation. The prophet's Gāthās (p. [191]) summoned the believer to live in the fellowship of the Good Mind and in obedience to the Most Excellent Order (Asha vahista), and the later Avesta seems sometimes to repeat their high demand: "Purity is for man, next to life, the greatest good; that purity that is procured by the law of Mazda to him who cleanses his own self with good thoughts, words, and deeds." It is the utterance of Ahura himself. But purity may be interpreted in very different ways: the lad who walks about over fifteen years of age without the sacred girdle and sacred shirt, has no forgiveness, for he has "power to destroy the world of the holy spirit"; while, on the other hand, to pull down the scaffold on which corpses had been deposited (the Persians employed neither burial nor cremation) was to destroy a centre of impure contagion, and secure pardon for all sins.
When Moses established the administration of justice at the sanctuary of Yahweh, he planted a powerful ethical influence in the heart of the religion of Israel. No reader of the Old Testament needs to be reminded of the prophetic rebukes of a monarch's crimes. Nathan and David, Elijah and Ahab, have become universal types. The history of Hebrew ethics shows how the conception of morality gradually passed from the regulation of external conduct into the inner sphere of thought; and the offender was no longer regarded merely as a member of a tribe or nation on which punishment might alight collectively; he stood in an immediate relation to his God. Primitive imagination could rest content with supposing that sin had first entered the world through the subtlety of a talking snake. Later thought found such a solution inadequate to enlarged moral experience. In the figure of the Adversary or the Opposer, the Sâtân, first traceable in Israel's literature after the Captivity, Judaism admitted a moral dualism analogous to the opposition between Ahura Mazda and Añra Mainyu. The Sâtân had, indeed, no creative power, though hordes of demons were under his sway in the abyss, and were sent forth to do the desolating work of madness and disease. But he was the head of a realm of evil over against the sovereignty of God; and the intensity of the moral consciousness of sin was reflected in the mythologic form of his warfare against the hosts of heaven.
Along a quite different line of thought, which may possibly have been stimulated from the Greek side, the humanists of later Israel endeavoured to bring nature and social life under one common conception of divine Wisdom. The earlier prophecy had regarded the physical world as plastic in Yahweh's hands, so that its events—such as drought or flood, the locust and the blight, could be made the immediate instruments of Israel's discipline. A wider culture brought new ideas. There were statutes and ordinances for the cosmic powers just as there were for communities of man. The universe was the product of the divine thought, and the same agency was seen in the structure and organisation of human societies. The order of the visible scene was due to the presence and control of Wisdom, which from the first had sat as a kind of assessor by Yahweh's side. The moral order was no less her work; she gave the sanction to all authority and rule; "By me kings reign," cries the poet in her name, "and princes decree justice"; and the men of humble heart know that their piety, "the fear of the Lord," is her gift, and links them in joyous fellowship with the stars on high.
That Mosaism started with a vigorous moral conception of the divine demands, however limited might be its early scope, is generally recognised. The gradual settlement of the immigrant tribes in the land of Canaan, the appropriation of Canaanite sanctuaries, and the adoption of their festivals and ritual, brought new influences which threatened the ancient simplicity. The voices of Hebrew prophecy rang out at Jerusalem ere Greek thought had begun to move. It was a singular result in Israel's history that the great truths of the unity and spirituality and holiness of God, which prophecy had won out of impassioned experience, were confided for their preservation to a code of Priestly Law which raised the elements of ritual and sacerdotal caste to their highest significance in the nation's life. But the law which declared sacrifice to be legitimate only on one altar, made room for a new development of Israel's religion. If the ancient faith was to be maintained by a race that spread from Babylon to Rome, it must adapt its worship to new conditions. There could be but one temple; but a meeting-house could be built anywhere; and the Synagogue thus became the birthplace of the congregations of the Christian Church.