There is perhaps a popular tendency in Europe (notwithstanding the doctrines of Herbert Spencer) to regard this cult as something peculiar to the Far East and without parallel in Western modes of religious thought and practice: but, as students of comparative religion well know, such is not the case. That ancestor-worship or something very like it existed among the ancient Egyptians might be assumed from the extraordinary measures which they took to preserve the bodies of the dead: but we know from other evidence that the ancestral Ghost was regularly approached with veneration and sacrifices. Cakes and other articles were offered to the Egyptian ka just as they are offered to the spirits of the dead in China to-day; and, as in China, the sacrificial ceremonies were made the occasion of family gatherings and genial festivities.[280] Great religious revolutions have taken place in Egypt in the course of ages, but among the Egyptian Mohammedans and the Copts traces of ancestor-worship exist to this day. The evidence at present available hardly justifies us in declaring that this cult was also practised in Babylonia, though it seems at least certain that heroes and distinguished men were deified and venerated. There is less doubt about the early Israelites. "It is impossible to avoid the conclusion," says the Rev. A. W. Oxford,[281] "that the pre-Jehovistic worship was that of ancestors." He observes that "the importance attached to a father's blessing before his death and the great fear caused by a curse (Judges xvii. 2) were relics of the old cult of ancestors."
The importance of the same cult in Greece and Rome can hardly be exaggerated. In Greece, Zeus himself was regarded in one of his aspects as πατρῷος, the ancestral god. "The central point of old Roman religion," as Grant Allen has said,[282] "was clearly the household; the family ghosts or lares were the most honoured gods." In various parts of the "Dark Continent" ancestor-worship is the prevailing religion. "Nowhere," says Max Müller, "is a belief and a worship of ancestral spirits so widely spread as in Africa."[283] That it existed and still exists in many Eastern countries besides China need hardly be emphasised. It is deeply embedded in Hinduism, and in Japan it has grafted itself on Shinto.[284]
It is perhaps of greater interest to Europeans to know that the cult of ancestors existed in pre-Christian days in the forests of old Germany. "Our early Teutonic forefathers," says Mr. F. York Powell, "worshipped the dead and treated their deceased ancestors as gods."[285] But old customs, especially religious ones, die hard; and so we need not be surprised to find that just as the Isis and Horus of the ancient Egyptians have become the Madonna and Child of the modern Italians,[286] so the ancestor-worship of our Teutonic forefathers has been transformed under Christian influences into solemn commemorations of the dead, and masses for the souls of the "faithful departed." The transformation, indeed, is in some places hardly complete to this day.
"Although full ancestor-worship," says Dr. Tylor, "is not practised in modern Christendom, there remains even now within its limits a well-marked worship of the dead. A crowd of saints, who were once men and women, now form an order of inferior deities, active in the affairs of men, and receiving from them reverence and prayer, thus coming strictly under the definition of manes. This Christian cultus of the dead, belonging in principle to the older manes worship, was adapted to answer another purpose in the course of religious transition in Europe."[287]
It appears that in one part of Christendom, at least, actual ancestor-worship is not yet extinct. In backward parts of Russia at this day, we are told, "the dead in return for the offerings are supplicated to guard and foster the family and crops. 'Ye spirits of the long departed, guard and preserve us well. Make none of us cripples. Send no plagues upon us. Cause the corn, the wine, and the food to prosper with us.'"[288] Evidently if ancestor-worship is idolatrous, Europe is not without its idolatry even in this twentieth century.
The Ancestral cult, as every one knows, received the hall-mark of Confucius's approval, though Confucius himself did not profess to be a theologian or to speak with authority on matters spiritual. It is an extraordinary thing that Confucius's reticence with regard to these matters has been selected by Christian missionaries as a subject for special reproach. Prof. Legge, after quoting some of Confucius's utterances on the subject of the unseen world, asks why he did not "candidly tell his real thoughts on so interesting a subject,"[289] and exclaims "Surely this was not the teaching proper to a sage." Elsewhere he solves this question himself, for he decides that Confucius was no sage.[290] Unfortunately he does not define the word Sage, though he seems to imply that the word can be fittingly applied only to a Christian teacher. He did not perhaps quite appreciate the significance of the Horatian remark Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona.