6. Sixthly, there remains a mode of communication from God to man to which there is nothing corresponding on our side; it is that of written documents. Man has never (so far as I am aware) imagined himself capable of sending a letter or written composition of any kind to God; but God is supposed, through the medium of human instruments, to have embodied his thoughts in writing for the benefit of the human race. The result is the very important category of holy books.
EXTERNAL MANIFESTATIONS OF RELIGIOUS SENTIMENT.
FIRST PART.
MEANS OF COMMUNICATION UPWARDS.
CHAPTER I.
CONSECRATED ACTIONS.
Adoration, or worship, is a direct result of one of the most universal of human instincts. After the instincts which impel us to provide for the necessities of the body, and to satisfy the passion of love, there is perhaps none more potent or more general. Men are driven to pray by an irresistible impulse. Differing widely as to the object of worship; differing not less widely as to its mode; differing in a minor degree as to the blessings it secures; they are agreed as to the fundamental ideas which it involves. In the first place it presupposes a power superior to, or at any rate different from, the power of man; in the second place it assumes a belief that this superhuman or non-human power can be approached by his worshipers; can be induced to listen to their desires, and to grant their petitions.
Of the first of the two elements thus implied in prayer, this is not the appropriate place to speak at length. In a very early and primitive stage of man's existence, he begins to feel his dependence upon powers invisible to his mortal eyes, whose mode of action he can but imperfectly comprehend. His way of conceiving these beings will depend upon his mental elevation, upon historical influences, upon local conditions, and other causes. Among very rude nations, the commonest and apparently most unimpressive objects will serve as fetishes, or incarnations of the mysterious force. Pieces of wood, stones, ornaments worn on the person, or almost anything, may under some circumstances do duty in this capacity. It is a further stage of progress when the more conspicuous objects of nature, lofty mountains, rivers, trees, fountains, and so forth, are deified, to the exclusion of more insignificant things. Still higher is the adoration of bodies which do not belong to this earth at all, and whose nature is, therefore, more mysterious—the sun, the moon, the planets or the stars, the clouds and tempests, the winds, and similar imposing phenomena. And this stage passes naturally into one where the gods, at first merely forces of nature personified, lose their character of forces, and become exclusively persons. They are then conceived as beings in human form, but endowed with much more than human faculties. Actual persons, especially the ancestors of the living generation, are also the frequent recipients of religious adoration. By other races, or by the same races at a later period, the numerous gods of polytheism are merged in one supreme god, to whom the others are subordinated as agents of his will, or before whose grandeur they disappear altogether; while this worship of powers conceived as beneficent is very frequently accompanied, more or less avowedly, by a parallel worship of powers conceived as malevolent, and whom, by reason of that very malevolence, it is occasionally deemed the more needful to conciliate.
The second element—the conviction that these deities are accessible to human requests—is shown both by the fact of worship being offered and by the mode in which it is conducted. In the first place, it is plain that prayer would not be offered at all but for the belief that it exercises some influence on the beings prayed to. But the theory does not require that they should be equally amenable to it at all times, from all persons, or in whatever way it is uttered. On the contrary, accessibility to prayer implies in these who receive it an inclination to listen with attention to the language in which they are addressed, and to be more or less moved by it according to its nature.
Reasoning from the authorities of earth whom he knows, to those of heaven whom he does not know, the primitive man concludes that the best way of obtaining the satisfaction of his wishes from the latter will be to address them in a tone of humble supplication, intermingled with such laudatory epithets as he deems most suitable to the deity invoked, or most likely to be agreeable to his ear. Hence we have the two devotional acts of prayer and praise, which in all religions constantly accompany one another, and constitute the simplest, most natural, and most ancient expression on the part of human beings of their consciousness of an overruling power, and of their desire to enter into relations with that dreaded and venerated agency.