To your great merrit given, A title to be called the sonne of Heaven.
Let us not pass by these metaphors with a disdainful smile, as mere unsubstantial poetic fancies. They are more or less rude attempts to give expression to the very important truth that the benefits which a nation derives from the rule of a wise and good sovereign are comparable to the blessings of the sun's warmth and light. As Browning, in 'Saul,' has well said:--
Each deed thou hast done Dies, revives, goes to work in the world, and is as the sun Looking down on the earth, though clouds spoil him, though tempests efface, Can find nothing his own deed produced not, must everywhere trace The results of his past summer prime--so each ray of thy will, Every flash of thy passion and prowess long over, shall thrill Thy whole people, the countless, with ardour till they too give forth A like cheer to their sons, who in turn fill the south and the north With the radiance thy deed was the germ of----.
It may be objected that it is contrary to the general law of human development to make the higher metaphorical conception precede the lower physical one. It is no doubt true that the physical idea of fatherhood must come before the metaphorical use of this relationship. But it does not follow that when once the metaphor is arrived at, it may not relapse into its original physical acceptation. The forces which produce religious progress act by waves, with intervals of stagnation or retrogression. Even when the general religious condition of a country is advancing it will be found that the lower popular stratum of thought consists less of undeveloped germs of future progress than of a breccia of the debased or imperfectly assimilated ideas of the wise men of preceding generations. In this retrograde movement a large part is played by the invincible tendency of the vulgar to give metaphors their literal signification. This, I take it, is the source of the numerous actual children or descendants of the Sun and other deities who are found all over the world, in Greece, Peru, Japan, and elsewhere. The sequence of ideas may be thus represented:--
I. The King or sage is like the Sun.
II. He is (rhetorically) a Sun, or the Sun's brother or offspring.
III. He is actually descended from the Sun in the nth generation, the intermediate links of the genealogy being a, b, c, d, &c., and he is therefore himself a divinity.
Herbert Spencer, in his 'Sociology,' says:--
"There are proofs that like confusion of metaphor with fact leads to Sun-worship. Complimentary naming after the sun occurs everywhere, and where it is associated with power, becomes inherited. The chiefs of the Hurons bore the name of the Sun; and Humboldt remarks that 'the "Sun-Kings" among the Natches recall to mind the Heliades of the first eastern colony of Rhodes.' Out of numerous illustrations from Egypt may be quoted an inscription from Silsilis--'Hail to thee! King of Egypt! Sun of the foreign peoples ... Life, salvation, health to him! he is a shining Sun.' In such cases, then, worship of the ancestor readily becomes worship of the Sun.... Personalization of the wind had an origin of this kind."
"Nature-worship, then, is but an aberrant form of ghost-worship."