The Martyrdom of Man, Winwood Reade [best book club books TXT] 📗

CHAPTER 2

Religion

 

When the poet invokes in his splendid frenzy the shining spheres of

heaven, the murmuring fountains, and the rushing streams; when he calls

upon the earth to hearken, and bids the wild sea listen to his song; when

he communes with the sweet secluded valleys and the haughty-headed

hills as if those inanimate objects were alive, as if those masses of brute

matter were endowed with sense and thought, we do not smile, we do not

sneer, we do not reason, but we feel. A secret chord is touched within us:

a slumbering sympathy is awakened into life. Who has not felt an

impulse of hatred, and perhaps expressed it in a senseless curse, against a

fiery stroke of sunlight or a sudden gust of wind? Who has not felt a

pang of pity for a flower torn and trampled in the dust, a shell dashed to

fragments by the waves? Such emotions or ideas last only for a moment;

they do not belong to us; they are the fossil fancies of a bygone age; they

are a heritage of thought from the childhood of our race. For there was a

time when they possessed the human mind. There was a time when the

phrases of modern poetry were the facts of ordinary life. There was a

time when man lived in fellowship with nature, believing that all things

which moved or changed had minds and bodies kindred to his own.

 

To those primeval people the sun was a great being who brightened them

in his pleasure and who scorched then in his wrath. The earth was a

sleeping monster: sometimes it rose a little and turned itself in bed. They

walked upon its back when living; they were put into its belly when they

died. Fire was a savage animal which bit when it was touched. The birds

and beasts were foreigners possessing languages and customs of their

own. The plants were dumb creatures with characters good or bad,

sometimes gloomy in aspect, malignant in their fruit, sometimes

dispensing wholesome food and pleasant shade.

 

These various forms of nature they treated precisely as if they had been

men. They sometimes adorned a handsome tree with bracelets like a girl;

they offered up prayers to the fruit trees, and made them presents to coax

them to a liberal return. They forbade the destruction of certain animals

which they revered on account of their wisdom, or feared on account of

their fierceness, or valued on account of their utility. They submitted to

the tyranny of the more formidable beasts of prey, never venturing to

attack them for fear the nation or species should retaliate, but making

them propitiatory gifts. In the same manner they offered sacrifices to

avert the fury of the elements, or in gratitude for blessings which had

been bestowed. But often a courageous people, when invaded, would go

to war, not only with the tiger and the bear but with powers which to

them were not less human-like and real. They would cut with their

swords at the hot wind of the desert, hurl their spears into the swollen

river, stab the earth, flog the sea, shoot their arrows at the flashing clouds,

and build up towers to carry heaven by assault.

 

But when through the operation of the law of growth the intellectual

faculties of men become improved, they begin to observe their own

nature, and in course of time a curious discovery is made. They ascertain

that there is something which resides within them entirely independent

and distinct from the body in which it is contained. They perceive that it

is this mind, or soul, or genius, or spirit, which thinks and desires and

decides. It commands the body as the chief commands the slave. While

the body is asleep it is busy weaving thoughts in the sleeper’s brain, or

wanders into other lands and converses with people whom he, while

awake, has never seen. They hear words of wisdom issuing from the

toothless mouth of a decrepit old man. It is evident that this soul does not

grow old, and therefore it does not die. The body, it is clear, is only a

garment which is in time destroyed, and then where does its inmate go?

 

When a loved one has been taken she haunts the memory of him who

weeps till the image imprinted on the heart is reflected on the curtain of

the eye. Her vision appears not when he is quite asleep, as in an ordinary

dream, but as he is passing into sleep. He meets her in the twilight land

which divides the world of darkness from the world of day. He sees her

form distinctly; he clasps it in his arms; he hears the accents of her sweet

and gentle voice; he feels the pressure of her lips upon his own. He

awakes, and the illusion is dispelled; yet with some it is so complete that

they firmly believe it was a spirit whom they saw.

 

Among savages it is not love which can thus excite the imagination and

deceive the sense, but reverence and fear. The great chief is dead. His

vision appears in a half-waking dream: it threatens and it speaks. The

dreamer believes that the form and the voice are real, and therefore he

believes that the great chief still exists. It is thus that the grand idea is

born. There is life after death. When the house or garment of the body is

destroyed the soul wanders forth into the air. Like the wind it is unseen;

like the wind it can be soft and kind; like the wind it can be terrible and

cruel. The savage then believes that the pains of sickness are inflicted by

the hand which so often inflicted pain upon him when it was in the flesh,

and he also believes that in battle the departed warrior is still fighting

with unseen weapons at the head of his own clan. In order to obtain the

goodwill of the father-spirit, prayers are offered up to him and food is

placed beside his grave. He is, in fact, still recognised as king, and to such

phantom monarchs the distinctive title of god is assigned. Each chief is

deified and worshipped when he dies. The offerings and prayers are

established by rule; the reigning chief becomes the family priest; he

pretends to receive communications from the dead, and issues laws in

their name. The deeds of valour which the chiefs performed in their

lifetime are set to song; their biographies descend from generation to

generation, changing in their course, and thus a regular religion and

mythology are formed.

 

It is the nature of man to reason from himself outwards. The savage now

ascribes to the various forms of matter souls or spirits such as he

imagines that he has discovered in himself. The food which he places at

the grave has a soul or essence, and it is this which is eaten by the spirit

of the dead, while the body of the food remains unchanged. The river is

not mere water which may dry up and perish, but there dwells within it a

soul which never dies; and so with everything that lives and moves, from

the blade of grass which shivers in the wind to the star which slowly

moves across the sky. But as men become more and more capable of

general ideas, of classing facts into systems and of arranging phenomena

into groups, they believe in a god of the forests, a god of the waters, and a

god of the sky, instead of ascribing a separate god to every tree, to every

river, and to every star. Nature is placed under the dominion of a

federation of deities. In some cases the ancestor gods are identified with

these; in others their worship is kept distinct. The trees and the animals,

which were once worshipped for themselves from love or fear, are now

supposed to be objects of affection to the gods, and are held sacred for

their sake.

 

These gods are looked upon as kings. Their characters are human, and

are reflected from the minds of those who have created them. Whatever

the arithmetical arrangement of the gods may be—single or triune, dual

or plural—they are in all countries and in all times made by man in his

own image. In the plural period some of the gods are good and some are

bad, just as there are good and evil kings. The wicked gods can be

softened by flattery and presents, the good ones can be made fierce by

neglect. The wicked gods obtain the largest offerings and the longest

prayers, just as in despotic countries the wicked kings obtain the most

liberal presents—which are merely taxes in disguise.

 

The savage has been led by indigestion and by dreams to believe in the

existence of the soul after death—or, using simpler language, to believe

in ghosts. At first these souls or ghosts have no fixed abode; they live

among the graves. At a later period the savage invents a world to which

the ghosts depart and in which they reside. It is situated underground. In

that world the ghosts live precisely as they lived on earth. There is