Page:EB1911 - Volume 23.djvu/92

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HIGHER RELIGIONS]
RELIGION
75

was extended to include the nations of the world, it was still upon the living that it would alight. The seers of Israel were content to dismiss their dead to a land of silence and darkness, the vast hollow gloom of the subterranean Sheol.[1] A far ruder outlook on life, however, which has again and again appealed to some form of the divine cognizance by means of the ordeal and the oath, frequently supplements the moral issues of this world by the judicial award of the next. Assuming the proper fulfilment of the ritual of death, ethics gradually extends its control over the future. At first the social distinctions of this life are simply continued hereafter: the chief remains a chief, the slave a slave; and the conditions of the future only prolong those of the present. In so far as tribal eminence depends on superior skill or courage or wisdom, the germs of ethical differentiation may be discovered even here. The process is carried further (1) in individual cases of retribution, when (as among the Kaupuis) crime within the tribe was punished, and a murderer becomes in the next life his victim's slave;[2] or (2) when service to the community received special reward, and warriors who had fallen in battle, women who had died in childbirth and merchants who had perished on a journey were sent in Mexico to the house of the sun.[3] As the social order acquires more definiteness and stability, the control of life by the gods tends to become more clearly moralized. This brings with it new standards independent of clan-customs or tribe-usage. Only the worst offences, however, at first draw down post-mortem punishment. The Homeric Erinyes chastise outrages on the poor, injuries to guests, failure to show the respect due to parents or to recognize the rights of age, in this life; only on perjury does the divine doom extend to the next.[4] On the other hand, the Egyptian version of “the whole duty of man” in the famous 125th chapter of the Book of the Dead embraces a singular complex of ritual, social and personal sins, in which the inward states of lying, anger and ill-will are condemned along with murder, theft and adultery, beside violation of the times of offerings to the gods, or interference with the food of the blessed dead. The great judgment of Osiris formulates with the utmost precision the alliance between morals and religion. The doctrine established itself in Greek theology under the influence of Orphism, and supplied Plato with mythic forms for his “criticism of life.” In India the union of morality and religion was effected in another manner. True, Yama, first of men to enter the world beyond, became the “King of Righteousness” before whose tribunal the dead must appear. But a new agency began to engage the speculations of thinkers, the moral values of action embodied in the Deed. “The deed does not perish,” ran an early formula.[5] “A man is born into the world that he has made, ” said another:[6] and what was laid down first as a ritual principle survived as an ethical. Buddhism conceived men as constantly making their own world for good and ill; it took over from Brahmanism a whole series of heavens and hells to provide an exact adjustment in the future for the virtue or vice of the present; and its eschatology confidence was one of the potent instruments of its success in countries which, like China and Japan, had developed no theories of retribution or reward beyond the grave. Along, a different line of thought the Iranian teachers, beholding the world divided between hostile powers, demanded, as the fundamental postulate of religion, the victory of the good. The conflict must end with the triumph of light, truth and right. The details of this remarkable scheme must be studied elsewhere (see Zoroaster). The award of the angel-judges at the Bridge of Assembly, soon after death, dispatched the individual to his appropriate lot in the homes of Good or Evil Thought, Word and Deed. But at length the long struggle would draw to an end. The great “divine event,” the frasho-kereti, the renovation, would set in. A new heaven and a new earth would be created: a general resurrection should take place; the powers of evil should be overthrown and extinguished; and hell should be brought back for the enlargement of the world. Eschatology has again and again expressed the alliance between ethics and religion. It remains for the future to show how long that alliance will require its support.

Bibliography.—(For primitive religion see preceding section.) Only a selection of the copious and ever-increasing literature can here be named. Monographs on the separate religions are named in their respective articles.

1. After Hume's Natural Hist. of Religions (1757) earlier surveys will be found in Meiners, Allgem. Krit. Gesch. der Religionen (2 vols., 1806-7); Constant, De la religion (5 vols., 1824-31); Baur, Symbolik und Mythologie (3 vols., 1825); Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythol. der alten Völker³ (1837); F. D. Maurice, The Religions of the World (1846); Hardwick, Christ and other Masters (4 vols., 1855-59); Döllinger, The Gentile and the Jew (2 vols., 1863). On Mythology and Religion English study was chiefly influenced by F. Max Müller, Essay on Comparative Mythology (1856); Chips from a German Workshop (1867 onwards); Lectures on the Science of Language (2 vols., 1861-64); Contributions to the Science of Mythology (2 vols., 1897); cf. A. Lang, Modern Mythology (1897). Earlier Anthropology, Bastian, Der Mensch in der Gesch. (3 vols., Leipzig, 1860); Waitz-Gerland, Anthropologie² (6 vols., Leipzig, 1877).

2. Translations from the Scriptures of various religions.—Sacred Books of the East (49 vols., 1879 and onwards); Annales du Musée Guimet (1880 and onwards).

3. Manuals, treatises and series in single or collective authorship.—C. P. Tiele, Outlines of the History of Religion, tr. Carpenter (London, 1877); Gesch. der Religion im Alterthum, tr. Gehrich (2 vols., Gotha, 1895-98); Kompendium der Religionsgesch., tr. Weber (Breslau, 1903); G. Rawlinson, Religions of the Ancient World (London, 1882); Religious Systems of the World, by various authors (London, 1890); Menzies, Hist. of Religion (1895); Orelli, Allgemeine Religionsgesch. (Bonn, 1899); Great Religions of the World, by various authors (1901); Bousset, Das Wesen der Religion (Halle, 1903); Eng. trans., What is Religion? (London, 1907); Chantepie de la Saussaye, Religionsgesch.³ (2 vols., 1905); Achelis, Abriss der Vergleichenden Religionswissenschaft (Sammlung Göschen); “Die Orientalischen Religionen” (in Die Kultur der Gegenwart), by various authors (1906); Pfleiderer, Religion und Religionen (Berlin, 1906); Eng. trans., Religion and Historic Faiths (London, 1907); Haarlem Series, Die Voornaamste Godsdiensten, beginning with Islam, by Dozy (1863 onwards); Soc. for Promotion of Christian Knowledge, Non-Christian Religions; Hibbert Lectures on The Origin and Growth of Religion (15 vols., beginning with F. Max Müller, 1878); Aschendorff's series, Darstellungen aus dem Gebiete der Nichtchristl. Religionsgesch. (14 vols., Münster i.w., beginning 1890); Handbooks on the History of Religions, ed. Jastrow, beginning with Hopkins on India (1895); American Lectures on the History of Religions, beginning with Rhys Davids on Buddhism (1896); Constable's series, Religions, Ancient and Modern (London, beginning 1905), brief and popular; J. Freeman Clarke, Ten Great Religions (Boston, 1871); S. Johnson, Oriental Religions, &c. (3 vols.); India² (London, 1873); China (Boston, 1877); Persia (1885); Lippert, Die Religionen der Europäischen Cultur-Völker (Berlin, 1881); A. Réville, Prolégom. de l'hist. des rel. (Paris, 1881; Engl. trans., 1884); Les Rel. des peuples non-civilisés (2 vols., Paris, 1883); Rel. du Mexique (1885); Rel. chinoise (1889); Letourneau, L'Evolution religieuse² (Paris, 1898); Publications of the École des hautes études, section des sciences religieuses; and Annales du Musée Guimet, “Bibliothèque de Vulgarisation.”

4. Works bearing on history.—Fustel de Coulanges, La Cité antique (Paris, 1864); Lubbock, Origin of Civilization (1870); Whitney, Oriental and Linguistic Studies (New York, 1872 and 1874); Brinton, The Religious Sentiment (1876); Myths of the New World² (New York, 1876); Essays of an Americanist (1890); Religions of Primitive Peoples (1897); Keary, Outlines of Primitive Belief (London, 1882); Leblois, Les Bibles et les initiateurs de l'humanité (4 vols. in 7 parts, Paris, 1883); Goblet d'Alviella, Introd. à l'hist. générale des religions (Brussels, 1887); La Migration des symboles (Paris, 1891); Hartland, The Legend of Perseus (3 vols., London, 1894); Ratzel, The History of Mankind, tr. Butler (3 vols., London, 1896); Usener, Götternamen (Bonn, 1896): Grant Allen, The Evolution of the Idea of God (London, 1897); Forlong, Short Studies in the Science of Comp. Religions (London, 1897); Lang, The Making of Religion (1898); Lyall, Asiatic Studies² (2 vols., London, 1809); Baissac, Les Origines de la religion² (Paris, 1899); Marillier, “Religion,” Grande Encyclop. xxviii. (Paris, 1900); Maculloch, Comparative Theol. (1902); Dieterich, Mutter Erde (Leipzig, 1905); S. Reinach, Cultes, mythes et religions (2 vols., Paris, 1905-6); Frazer, Adonis, Attis and Osiris (1906); Ed. Meyer, Gesch. des Alterthums², I. i. “Einleitung: Elemente der Anthropologie” (1907).

5. Psychology, Philosophy and History.—Hege, Philosophy of


  1. Cf. Ezek. xxxii. 17-32; Ps. lxxxviii 3-4, 10, 11; Job x. 21-22, and many other passages.
  2. Watt, Journ. Anthrop. Institute, xvi p. 356. Cf. Codrington, The Melanesians (1891), p. 274.
  3. Bancroft, Native Races of the Pacifc States of N. America, iii. p. 532.
  4. Il. iii. 278-79; xix. 258-60.
  5. S.B.E. ii. p. 271; xiv. pp. 116, 310.
  6. Ibid. xli. p. 181.