They saw the skies in constant order run,
The varied seasons and the circling sun,
Apparent rule, with unapparent cause,
And thus they sought in Gods the source of laws.
The same feeling may be traced in the early mythology of a large portion of the globe. We might easily, taking advantage of the labours of learned men, exemplify this in the case of the oriental nations, of Greece, and of many other countries. Nor does there appear much difficulty in pointing out the error of those who have maintained that all religion had its origin in the worship of the stars and the elements; and who have insinuated that all such impressions are unfounded, inasmuch as these are certainly not right objects of human worship. The religious feeling, the conviction of a supernatural power, of an intelligence connecting and directing the phenomena of the world, had not its origin in the worship of sun, or stars, or elements; but was itself the necessary though unexpressed foundation of all worship, and all forms of false, as well as true, religion. The contemplation of the earth and heavens called into action this religious tendency in man; and to say that the worship of the material world formed or suggested this religious feeling, is to invert the order of possible things in the most unphilosophical manner. Idolatry is not the source of the belief in God, but is a compound of the persuasion of a supernatural government, with certain extravagant and baseless conceptions as to the manner in which this government is exercised.
We will quote a passage from an author who has illustrated at considerable length the hypothesis that all religious belief is derived from the worship of the elements.
“Light, and darkness its perpetual contrast; the succession of days and nights, the periodical order of the seasons; the career of the brilliant luminary which regulates their course; that of the moon his sister and rival; night, and the innumerable fires which she lights in the blue vault of heaven; the revolutions of the stars, which exhibit them for a longer or a shorter period above our horizon; the constancy of this period in the fixed stars, its variety in the wandering stars, the planets; their direct and retrograde course, their momentary rest; the phases of the moon waxing, full, waning, divested of all light; the progressive motion of the sun upwards, downwards; the successive order of the rising and setting of the fixed stars, which mark the different points of the course of the sun, while the various aspects which the earth itself assumes mark, here below also, the same periods of the sun’s annual motion; * * * all these different pictures, displayed before the eyes of man, formed the great and magnificent spectacle by which I suppose him surrounded at the moment when he is about to create his gods.”[31]
What is this (divested of its wanton levity of expression) but to say, that when man has so far traced the course of nature as to be irresistibly impressed with the existence of order, law, variety in constancy, and fixity in change; of relations of form and space, duration and succession, cause and consequence, among the objects which surround him; there springs up in his breast, unbidden and irresistibly, the thought of superintending intelligence, of a mind which comprehended from the first and completely that which he late and partially comes to know? The worship of earth and sky, of the host of heaven and the influences of nature, is not the ultimate and fundamental fact in the early history of the religious impressions of mankind. These are but derivative streams, impure and scanty, from the fountain of religious feeling which appears to be disclosed to us by the contemplation of the universe, as the seat of law and the manifestation of intellect. Time suggests to man the thought of eternity; space of infinity; law of intelligence; order of purpose; and however difficult and long a task it may be to develope these suggestions into clear convictions, these thoughts are the real parents of our natural religious belief. The only relation between true religion and the worship of the elemental world is, that the latter is the partial and gross perversion, the former the consistent and pure developement of the same original idea.
2. The connexion of the laws of the material world with an intelligence which preconceived and instituted the law, which is thus, as we perceive, so generally impressed on the common apprehension of mankind, has also struck no less those who have studied nature with a more systematic attention, and with the peculiar views which belong to science. The laws which such persons learn and study, seem, indeed, most naturally to lead to the conviction of an intelligence which originally gave to the law its form.
What we call a general law is, in truth, a form of expression including a number of facts of like kind. The facts are separate; the unity of view by which we associate them, the character of generality and of law, resides in those relations which are the object of the intellect. The law once apprehended by us, takes in our minds the place of the facts themselves, and is said to govern or determine them, because it determines our anticipations of what they will be. But we cannot, it would seem, conceive a law, founded on such intelligible relations, to govern and determine the facts themselves, any otherwise than by supposing also an intelligence by which these relations are contemplated, and these consequences realized. We cannot then represent to ourselves the universe governed by general laws otherwise than by conceiving an intelligent and conscious Deity, by whom these laws were originally contemplated, established, and applied.