Our modern physiologists and anti-Christian speculators seem all to take it for granted that the savage gives us the type of the primitive man. We refuted this absurd notion in our essay on Faith and the Sciences. There are no known historical facts to support it. Consult the record chronicled in the rocks, as read by geologists. What does it prove? Why, in the lowest and most ancient strata in which human remains are found, along with those of extinct species of animals, you find that the men of that epoch used stone implements, and were ignorant of metals or unable to work them, and, therefore, must have been savages. That is, the men who lived then, and in that locality. Be it so. But does this prove that there did not, contemporary with them, in other localities or in other quarters of the globe, live and flourish nations in the full vigor of the manhood of the race, having all the arts and implements of civilized life? Did the savages of New England, when first discovered, understand working in iron, and used they not stone axes, and stone knives, many of which we have ourselves picked up? And was it the same with Europeans? From the rudeness and uncivilized condition of a people in one locality, you can conclude nothing as to the primitive condition of the race.
The infancy of the race, if there is any justice in the analogy assumed, is the age of growth, of progress; but nothing is less progressive, or more strictly stationary, in a moral and intellectual sense, than the savage state. Since history began, there is not only no instance on record of a savage tribe rising by indigenous effort to civilization, but none of a purely savage tribe having ever, even by foreign assistance, become a civilized nation. The Greeks in the earliest historical or semi-historical times, were not savages, and we have no evidence that they ever were. The Homeric poems were never the product of a savage people, or of a people just emerging from the savage state into civilization, and they are a proof that the Greeks, as a people, had juster ideas of religion, and were less superstitious in the age of Homer than in the age of St. Paul. The Germans are a civilized people, and if they were first revealed to us as what the Greeks and Romans called barbarians, they were never, as far as known, savages. We all know how exceedingly difficult it is to civilize our North American Indians. Individuals now and then take up the elements of our civilization, but rarely, if they are of pure Indian blood. They recoil before the advance of civilization. The native Mexicans and Peruvians have, indeed, received some elements of Christian civilization along with the Christian faith and worship; but they were not, on the discovery of this continent, pure savages, but had many of the elements of a civilized people, and that they were of the same race with the savages that roamed our northern forests, is not yet proved. The historical probabilities are not on the side of the hypothesis of the modern progressivists, but are on the side of the contrary doctrine, that the savage state belongs to the old age of the race—is not that from which man rises, but that into which he falls.
Nor is there any historical evidence that superstition is older than religion, that men begin in the counterfeit and proceed to the genuine,—in the false, and proceed by way of development to the true. They do not abuse a thing before having it. Superstition presupposes religion, as falsehood presupposes truth; for falsehood being unable to stand by itself, it is only by the aid of truth that it can be asserted. "Fear made the gods," sings Lucretius; but it can make none where belief in the gods, does not already exist. Men may transfer their own sentiments and passions to the divinity; but they must believe that the divinity exists before they can do it. They must believe that God is, before they can hear him in the wind, see him in the sun and stars, or dread him in the storm and the earthquake. It is not from dread of the strange, the powerful, or the vast, that men develop the idea of God, the spiritual, the supernatural; the dread presupposes the presence and activity of the idea. Men, again, who, like the professor's man in the infancy of the savage state, are able to conceive of spirit and to distinguish between the outward manifestation and the indwelling spirit, are not fetich worshippers, and for them the fetich is no longer a god, but if retained at all, it is as a sign or symbol of the invisible, Fetichism is the grossest form of superstition, and obtains only among tribes fallen into the grossest ignorance, that lie at the lowest round of the scale of human beings; not among tribes in whom intelligence is commencing, but in whom it is well-nigh extinguished.
Monotheism is older than polytheism, for polytheism, as the author himself seems to hold, grows out of pantheism, and pantheism evidently grows out of theism, out of the loss or perversion of the idea of creation, or of the relation between the creator and the creature, or cause and effect, and is and can be found only among a people who have once believed in one God, creator of heaven and earth and all things visible and invisible. Moreover, the earliest forms of the heathen superstitions are, so far as historical evidence goes, the least gross, the least corrupt. The religion of the early Romans was pure in comparison with what it subsequently became, especially after the Etruscan domination or influence. The Homeric poems show a religion less corrupt than that defended by Aristophanes. The earliest of the Vedas, or sacred books of the Hindoos, are free from the grosser superstitions of the latest, and were written, the author very justly thinks, before those grosser forms were introduced. This is very remarkable, if we are to assume that the grossest forms of superstition are the earliest! But we have with Greeks, Egyptians, Indians, no books that are of earlier date than the books of Moses, at least none that can be proved to have been written earlier; and in the books of Moses, in whatever light or character we take them, there is shown a religion older than any of the heathen mythologies, and absolutely free from every form of superstition, what is called the patriarchal religion, and which is substantially the Jewish and Christian religion. The earliest notices we have of idolatries and superstitions are taken from these books, the oldest extant, at least none older are known. If these books are regarded as historical documents, then what we Christians hold to be the true religion has obtained with a portion of the race from the creation of man, and, for a long series of years, from the creation to Nimrod, the mighty hunter or conqueror, was the only religion known; and your fetichisms, polytheisms, pantheisms, idolatries, and superstitions, which you note among the heathen, instead of being the religion of the infancy of the race, are, comparatively speaking, only recent innovations. If their authenticity as historical documents be denied, they still, since their antiquity is undeniable, prove the patriarchal religion obtained at an earlier date than it can be proved that any of the heathen mythologies existed. It is certain, then, that the patriarchal, we may say, the Christian religion, is the earliest known religion of the race, and therefore that fetichism, as contended by the positivists and the professor after them, cannot be asserted to have been the religion of the human race in the earliest stage of its existence, nor the germ from which all the various religions or superstitions of the world have been developed.
But we may go still farther. The attempt to explain the origin and course of religion by the study of the various heathen mythologies, and idolatries, and superstitions, is as absurd as to attempt to determine the origin and course of the Christian religion by the study of the thousand and one sects that have broken off from the church, and set up to be churches themselves. They can teach us nothing except the gradual deterioration of religious thought, and the development and growth of superstition or irreligion among those separated from the central religious life of the race. In the ancient Indian, Egyptian, and Greek mythologies, on which the author dwells with so much emphasis, we trace no gradual purification of the religious idea, but its continual corruption and debasement. As the sects all presuppose the Christian church, and could neither exist nor be intelligible without her, so those various heathen mythologies presuppose the patriarchal religion, are unintelligible without it, and could not have originated or exist without it. The professor having studied these mythologies in the darkness of no-religion, understands nothing of them, and finds no sense in them—as little sense as a man ignorant of Catholicity would find in the creeds, confessions, and religious observances of the several Protestant sects; but if he had studied them in the light of the patriarchal religion, which they mutilate, corrupt, or travesty, he might have understood them, and have traced with a steady hand their origin and course, and their relation to the intellectual development of the race.
We have no space to enter at length into the question here suggested. In all the civilized heathen nations, the gods are divided into two classes, the Dii Majores and the Dii Minores. The Dii Majores are only the result of a false effort to explain the mysterious dogma of the Trinity, and the perversion of the Christian doctrine of the Eternal Generation of the Son, and the Eternal Procession of the Holy Ghost. The type from which these mythologies depart, not which they realize, is undeniably the mystery of the Trinity asserted, more or less explicitly, by the patriarchal religion; and hence, we find them all, from the burning South to the frozen North, from the East to the West, from the Old World to the New, asserting, in some form, in the Divinity the sacred and mysterious Triad. The Dii Minores are a corruption or perversion of the Catholic doctrine of saints and angels, or that doctrine is the type which has been perverted or corrupted, by substituting heroes for saints, and the angels that fell for the angels that stood, and taking these for gods instead of creatures. The enemies of Christianity have sufficiently proved that the common type of both is given in the patriarchal religion, hoping thereby to get a conclusive argument against Christianity; but they have forgotten to state that, while the one conforms to the type, the other departs from it, perverts or corrupts it, and that the one that conforms is prior in date to the one that corrupts, perverts or departs from it. No man can study the patriarchal religion without seeing at a glance that it is the various forms of heathenism that are the corrupt forms, as no man can study both Catholicity and Protestantism without seeing that Protestantism is the corruption, or perversion—sometimes even the travesty of Catholicity. The same conclusion is warranted alike by Indian and Egyptian gloom and Greek gayety. The gloom speaks for itself. The gayety is that of despair—the gayety that says: "Come, let us eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die." Through all heathendom you hear the wail, sometimes loud and stormy, sometimes low and melodious, over some great and irreparable loss, over a broken and unrealized ideal, just as you do in the modern sectarian and unbelieving world.
But why is it that the professor and others, when seeking to give the origin and course of religion, as related to the intellectual development of the race, pass by the patriarchal, Jewish, or Christian religion, and fasten on the religions or superstitions of the Gentiles? It is their art, which consists in adroitly avoiding all direct attacks on the faith of Christendom, and confining themselves in their dissertations on the natural history of the pagan superstitions, to establishing principles which alike undermine both them and Christianity. It is evident to every intelligent reader of Professor Draper's Intellectual Development of Europe, that he means the principles he asserts shall be applied to Christianity as well as to Indian, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman mythology, and he gives many broad hints to that effect. What then? Is he not giving the history of the intellectual development of Europe? Can one give the history of that development without taking notice of religion? If, in giving the natural history of religion, showing whence and how it originates, what have been its developments, its course, its modifications, changes, decay, and death, by the influence of natural causes, science establishes principles which overthrow all religions, and render preposterous all claims of man to have received a supernatural revelation, to be in communion with the Invisible, or to be under any other providence than that of the fixed, invariable, and irresistible laws of nature, or purely physiological laws, whose fault is it? Would you condemn science, or subordinate it to the needs of a crafty and unscrupulous priesthood, fearful of losing their influence, and having the human mind emancipated from their despotism? That is, you lay down certain false principles, repudiated by reason and common sense, and which all real science rejects with contempt, call these false principles science, and when we protest, you cry out with all your lungs, aided by all the simpletons of the age, that we are hostile to science, would prevent free scientific investigation, restrain free manly thought, and would keep the people from getting a glimpse of the truth that would emancipate them, and place them on the same line with the baboon or the gorilla! A wonderful thing, is this modern science; and always places, whatever it asserts or denies, its adepts in the right, as against the theologians and the anointed priests of God!
The mystery is not difficult to explain. The physiologists, of course, are good Sadducees, and really, unless going through a churchyard after dark, or caught in a storm at sea, and in danger of shipwreck, believe in neither angel nor spirit. They wish to reduce all events, all phenomena, intellectual, moral, and religious, to fixed, invariable, inflexible, irreversible, and necessary laws of nature. They exclude in doctrine, if not in words, the supernatural, creation, providence, and all contingency. Every thing in man and in the universe is generated or developed by physiological or natural laws, and follows them in all their variations and changes. Religion, then, must be a natural production, generated by man, in conjunction with nature, and modified, changed, or destroyed, according to the physical causes to which he is subjected in time and place. This is partially true, or, at least, not manifestly false in all respects of the various pagan superstitions, and many facts may be cited that seem to prove it; but it is manifestly not true of the patriarchal, Jewish, and Christian religion, and the only way to make it appear true, is to not distinguish that religion from the others, to include all religions in one and the same category, and conclude that what they prove to be partially true of a part, is and must be true of the whole. That this is fair or logical, is not a matter that the physiologists, who, where they detect an analogy, conclude identity, trouble themselves at all about; besides, nothing in their view is illogical or unfair that tends to discredit priests and theologians. Very likely, also, such is their disdain or contempt of religion, that they really do not know that there is any radical difference between Christianity and Gentooism. We have never encountered a physiologist, in the sense we use the term here, that is, one who maintains that all in the history of man and the universe proceeds from nature alone, who had much knowledge of Christian theology, or knowledge enough to be aware that in substance it is not identical with the pagan superstitions. Their ignorance of our religion is sublime.
We have thus far proceeded on the supposition that the professor means by the infancy of the savage state the infancy of the race; we are not sure, after all, that this is precisely his thought, or that he means anything more than the infancy of a particular nation or family of nations is the savage state. He, however, sums up his doctrine in his table of contents, chapter i., of his Intellectual Development, in the proposition: "Individual man is an emblem of communities, nations, and universal humanity. They exhibit epochs of life like his, and like him are under the control of physical conditions, and therefore of law;" that is, physical or physiological law, for "human physiology" is only a special department of universal physiology, as we have already indicated. It would seem from this that the author makes the savage state, as we have supposed, correspond, in the race, in universal humanity, as well as in communities, to the epoch of infancy in the individual. But does he mean to teach that the race itself has its epoch of infancy, youth, manhood, old age, and death? He can, perhaps, in a loose sense, predicate these several epochs of nations and of political or civil communities; but how can he predicate them all of the race? "Individuals die, humanity survives," says Seneca; and are we to understand that the professor means to assert that the race is born like the individual, passes through childhood, youth, manhood, to old age, and then dies? Who knows what he means?