We have now seen that the moon is populated with men, women, and children,--hares and rabbits, toads and frogs, cats and dogs, and sundry small "cattle"; we observe in making our exit that it is also planted with a variety of trees; in short, is a zoological garden of a high order. Even among the ancients some said the lunar spots were forests where Diana hunted, and that the bright patches were plains. Captain Cook tells us that in the South Pacific "the spots observed in the moon are supposed to be groves of a sort of trees which once grew in Otaheite, and, being destroyed by some accident, their seeds were carried up thither by doves, where they now flourish." [100] Ellis also tells of these Tahitians that "their ideas of the moon, which they called avae or marama, were as fabulous as those they entertained of the sun. Some supposed the moon was the wife of the sun; others that it was a beautiful country in which the aoa grew." [101] These arborary fancies derive additional interest, if not a species of verisimilitude, from the record of a missionary that "a stately tree, clothed with dark shining leaves, and loaded with many hundreds of large green or yellowish-coloured fruit, is one of the most splendid and beautiful objects to be met with among the rich and diversified scenery of a Tahitian landscape."
Our collection of lunar legends is now on exhibition. No thoughtful person will be likely to dispute the dictum of Sir John Lubbock that "traditions and myths are of great importance, and indirectly throw much light on the condition of man in ancient times." [102] But they serve far more purposes than this. They are the raw material, out of which many of our goodly garments of modern science and religion are made up. The illiterate negroes on the cotton plantation, and the rude hunters in the jungle or seal fishery, produce the staple, or procure the skins, which after long labour afford comfort and adornment to proud philosophers and peers. The golden cross on the saintly bosom and the glittering crown on the sovereign brow were embedded as rough ore in primeval rocks ages before their wearers were born to boast of them. We shall esteem our treasures none the less because their origin is known, as we love "the Best of men" none the less because he was born of a woman. We closed our series of moon myths with a vision of a beautiful country, ornamented with groves of fruitful trees, whose seeds had been carried thither by white-winged doves; and carried thither because "some accident" had destroyed the trees in their native isles on earth. Thus the lunar world had become a desirable scene of superior and surpassing loveliness. Who can reflect upon this dream of human childhood, and not recall some dreams of later years? Who can fail to discern slight touches of the same hand which we see displayed in other designs? "Happily for historic truth," says Mr. Tylor, "mythic tradition tells its tales without expurgating the episodes which betray its real character to more critical observation." [103] Who is not led on from Tahiti to Greece, and to the Isles of the Blessed, the Elysium which abounds in every charm of life, and to the garden of the Hesperides, with its apples of gold; thence to the Meru of the Hindoos, the sacred mountain which is perpetually clothed in the rays of the sun, and adorned with every variety of plants and trees; thence again to the Heden of the Persians, of matchless beauty, where ever flourishes the tree Hom with its wonderful fruit; on to the Chinese garden, near the gate of heaven, whose noblest spring is the fountain of life, and whose delightful trees bear fruits which preserve and prolong the existence of man? [104] Thence an easy entrance is gained to the Hebrew Paradise, with its abounding trees "pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden"; and finally arises a sight of the "better land" of the Christian poetess, the incorruptible and undefiled inheritance of the Christian preacher, the prospect which is "ever vernal and blooming,--and, best of all, amid those trees of life there lurks no serpent to destroy,--the country, through whose vast region we shall traverse with untired footsteps, while every fresh revelation of beauty will augment our knowledge, and holiness, and joy." [105] Who will travel on such a pilgrimage of enlarged thought, and not come to the conclusion that if one course of development has been followed by all scientific and spiritual truth, then "almost the whole of the mythology and theology of civilized nations maybe traced, without arrangement or co-ordination, and in forms that are undeveloped and original rather than degenerate, in the traditions and ideas of savages"? [106] Such a conclusion may diminish our self-esteem, if we have supposed ourselves the sole depositaries of Divine knowledge; but it will exalt our conception of the generosity of the Father of all men, who never left a human soul without a witness of His invisible presence and ineffable love.
I. INTRODUCTION.
We have now to show that the moon has been in every age, and remains still, one of the principal objects of human worship. Even among certain nations credited with pure monotheism, it will be manifested that there was the practice of that primitive polytheism which adored the hosts of heaven. And, however humiliating or disappointing the disclosure may prove, it will be established that some of the foremost Christian peoples of the world maintain luniolatry to this day, notwithstanding that they have the reproving light of the latest civilization. We are so prone to talk of heathenism as abroad, that we forget or neglect the gross heathenism which abounds at home; and while we complacently speak of the march of the world's progress with which we identify ourselves, we are oblivious of the fact that much ancient falsehood survives and blends with the truth in which our superior minds, or minds with superior facilities, have been trained. How few of us reflect that the signs and symbols of rejected theories have passed into the nomenclature of received systems! Nay, we plume ourselves upon the new translation or revision as if we were the favoured recipients of some fresh revelation. Not only in the names of our days and months, but also in some of our most cherished dogmas, we are but the "liberal-conservatives" in religion, who retain the old, while we congratulate ourselves upon being the apostles of the new. That the past must always run into the present, and the present proceed from the past, we readily enough allow as a natural and necessary law; yet baptized heathenism is often heathenism still, under another name. Again, we are sometimes so short-sighted that we deny to former periods the paternity of their own more fortunate offspring, and behave like prosperous children who ungratefully ignore their poorer parents, to whom they owe their breath and being. Such treatment of history is to be emphatically deprecated, whether it arises from ignorance or ingratitude. We ought to know, if we do not, and we ought also to acknowledge, that our perfect day grew out of primeval darkness, and that the progress was a lingering dawn. This we hold to be the clearest view of the Divine causation. Our modern method in philosophy, largely owing to the Novum Organum of Bacon, is evolution, the novum organum of the nineteenth century; and this process recognises no abrupt or interruptive creations, but gradual transformations from pre-existent types, "variations under domestication," and the passing away of the old by its absorption into the new. Our religion, like our language, is a garden not only for indigenous vegetation, but also for acclimatisation, in which we improve under cultivation exotic plants whose roots are drawn from every soil on the earth. And, as Paul preached in Athens the God whom the Greeks worshipped in ignorance, so our missionaries carry back to less enlightened peoples the fruit of that life-giving tree whose germs exist among themselves, undeveloped and often unknown. No religion has fallen from heaven, like the fabled image of Athene, in full-grown beauty. All spiritual life is primordially an inspiration or intuition from the Father of spirits, whose offspring all men are, and who is not far from every one of them. This intuition prompts men to "seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after Him, and find Him." Thus prayer becomes an instinct; and to worship is as natural as to breathe. But man is a being with five senses, and as his contact with his fellow-creatures and with the whole creation is at one or other of those five points, he is necessarily sensuous. Endowed with native intelligence, the intellectus ipse of Leibnitz, he nevertheless receives his impressions on sensitive nerves, his emotions are sentiments, his words become sentences, and his stock of wisdom is his common sense. A few, very few, words express his sensations, a few more his perceptions, and so on; but he is conscious of objects at first, he deals with subjects afterwards. Soon the sun, moon, and stars, as bright lights attract his eyes, as we have all seen an infant of a few days fix its gaze upon a candle or lamp. These heavenly orbs are found to be in motion, to be far away, to be the glory of day and night: what wonder if ideas of these images are formed in the religious mind, if the worshipper imagines the sun and moon to be reflections of the God of light, and pays homage to the creature which renders the Creator visible? Thus in the childhood of man religion grows, and with the multiplication of intellect and sensation, endless diversity of language, conception and faith is the result. Another result, of course, is the endless diversity of deities. Every race, every nation, every tribe, every household, every heart, has had its own God. And yet, with all this multiplicity in religious literature and dogma, subject and object, a unity co-exists which the student of the science notes with profound interest. All nations of men are of one blood; and all forms of God embody the one Eternal Spirit. To this unity mythology tends. As one writer says: "We must ever bear in mind that the course of mythology is from many gods toward one, that it is a synthesis, not an analysis, and that in this process the tendency is to blend in one the traits and stories of originally separate divinities." [107] The ancient Hebrew worshipped God as "the Eternal, our righteousness"; the Greek worshipped Him as wisdom and beauty; the Roman as power and government; the Persian as light and goodness; and so forth. Few hymns have surpassed the beauty of Pope's Universal Prayer. It is the Te Deum laudamus of that catholic Church which embraces God-loved humanity.
"Father of all! in every age,
In every clime, adored,
By saint, by savage, and by sage,
Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!"
The Christian, believing his to be the "One Religion," as a recent Bampton Lecturer termed it, too often forgets that his system is a recomposition of rays of a religious light which was decomposed in the prismatic minds of earlier men. And further, with a change of metaphor, if Christianity has flourished and fructified through eighteen centuries, it must not be denied that it is a graft upon an old stock which through fifteen previous centuries had borne abundant fruit. The same course must be adopted still. We find men everywhere holding some truth; we add further truth; until, as a chemist would say, we saturate the solution, which upon evaporation produces a crystallized life of entirely new colour and quality and form. Thus Professor Nilsson writes: "Every religious change in a people is, in fact, only an intermixture of religions; because the new religion, whether received by means of convincing arguments, or enforced by the eloquence of fire and sword, cannot at once tear up all the wide-spreading roots by which its forerunner has grown in the heart of the people; this must be the work of many years, perhaps of many generations." [108] We cannot better close this lengthy introduction than by reminding Christians of the saying of their Great and Good Teacher, "I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil."
II. THE MOON MOSTLY A MALE DEITY.