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

gave and the king taketh

away. Blessed be the name of the king!” The man who lives in a distant

province, who knows the king only by means of the taxes which are

collected in his name, will snatch up his arms if he hears that his sacred

person is in danger, and will defend him as he defends his children and

his home. He will sacrifice his life for one whom he has never seen, and

who has never done him anything but harm.

 

This kind of devotion is called loyalty when exhibited towards a king,

piety when exhibited towards a god. But in either case the sentiment is

precisely the same. It cannot be too often repeated that god is only a

special name for king; that religion is a form of government, its precepts a

code of laws; that priests are gatherers of divine taxes, officers of divine

police; that men resort to churches to fall on their knees and to sing

hymns from the same servile propensity which makes the Oriental delight

in prostrating himself before the throne; that the noble enthusiasm which

inspires men to devote themselves to the service of their god, and to

suffer death rather than deny his name, is identical with the devotion of

the faithful subject who, to serve his royal master, gives up his fortune or

his life without the faintest prospect of reward. The religious sentiment,

about which so much has been said, has nothing distinctive in itself.

Love and fear, self-denial and devotion, existed before those phantoms

were created which men call gods, and men have merely applied to

invisible kings the sentiments which they had previously felt towards

their earthly kings. If they are a people in a savage state they hate both

kings and gods within their hearts, and obey them only out of fear. If

they are a people in a higher state love is mingled with their fear,

producing an affectionate awe which in itself is pleasing to the mind.

That the worship of the unseen king should survive the worship of the

earthly king is natural enough, but even that will not endure for ever; the

time is coming when the crowned idea will be cast aside and the despotic

shadow disappear.

 

By thus translating, or by re-translating, god into king, piety into loyalty,

and so on; by bearing in mind that the gods were not abstract ideas to our

ancestors as they are to us, but bona fide men differing only from men on

earth in their invisibility and other magic powers; by noting that the moral

disposition of a god is an image of the moral sense of those who worship

him—their beau-ideal of what a king should be; by observing that the

number and arrangement of the gods depend exclusively on the

intellectual faculties of the people concerned, on their knowledge of

nature, and perhaps to some extent on the political forms of government

under which they live: above all by remembering that there is a gradual

development in supernatural ideas, the student of comparative religion

will be able to sift and classify with ease and clearness dense masses of

mythology. But he must understand that the various stages overlap. Just

as sailing vessels and four-horse coaches are still used in this age of

steam, and as stone implements were still to be found in use long after the

age of iron had set in, so in the early period of god-belief thing-worship

still to a certain extent endured. In a treaty between Hannibal and Philip

of Macedonia which Polybius preserved, the contracting parties take oath

with one another “n the presence of Jupiter, Juno, and Apollo; in the

presence of the deity of the Carthaginians and of Hercules and of Iolaus;

in the presence of Mars, Triton, and Neptune; in the presence of all the

gods who are with us in the camp; and of the sun, the moon, and the

earth; the rivers, the lakes, and the waters.” In the time of Socrates the

Athenians regarded the sun as an individual. Alexander, according to

Arian, sacrificed not only to the gods of the sea but “the sea itself was

honoured with is munificence.” Even in Job, the purest of all

monotheistic works, the stars are supposed to be live creatures which sing

around the heavenly throne.

 

Again, in those countries where two distinct classes of men exist, the one

intellectual and learned, the other illiterate and degraded, there will be in

reality two religions, though nominally there may be only one. Among

the ancient Sabaeans the one class adored spirits who inhabited the stars,

the other class adored the stars themselves. Among the worshippers of

fire that element to one class was merely an emblem, to the other an

actual person. Wherever idols or images are used the same phenomenon

occurs. These idols are intended by the priests as aids to devotion, as

books for those who cannot read. But the savage believes that his god

inhabits the image, or even regards the image as itself a god. His feelings

towards it are those of a child towards her doll. She knows that it is filled

with sawdust and made of painted wood, and yet she loves it as if it were

alive. Such is precisely the illusion of the savage, for he possesses the

imagination of a child. He talks to his idol fondly and washes its face

with oil or rum, beats it if it will not give him what he asks, and hides it in

his waistcloth if he is going to do something which he does not wish it to

see.

 

There is one other point which it is necessary to observe. A god´s moral

disposition, his ideas of right and wrong, are those of the people by whom

he is created. Wandering tribes do not as a rule consider it wrong to rob

outside the circle of their clan: their god is therefore a robber like

themselves. If they settle in a fertile country, pass into the agricultural

state, build towns, and become peaceful citizens with property of their

own they change their views respecting theft, and accordingly their god

forbids it in his laws. But it sometimes happens that the sayings and

doings of the tent-god are preserved in writings which are accepted as

revelation by the people of a later and better age. Then may be observed

the curious and by no means pleasing spectacle of a people outgrowing

their religion, and believing that their god performed actions which would

be punished with the gallows if they were done by men.

 

The mind of an ordinary man is in so imperfect a condition that it requires

a creed—that is to say, a theory concerning the unknown and the

unknowable in which it may place its deluded faith and be at rest. But

whatever the creed may be, it should be one which is on a level with the

intellect, and which inquiry will strengthen not destroy.

 

As for minds of the highest order, they must ever remain in suspension of

judgement and in doubt. Not only do they reflect the absurd traditions of

the Jews, but also the most ingenious attempts which have been made to

explain on rational and moral grounds the origine and purpose of the

universe. Intense and long-continued labour reveals to them this alone,

that there are regions of thought so subtle and so sublime that the human

mine is unable therein to expand its wings, to exercise its strength. But

there is a wide speculative field in which man is permitted to toil with the

hope of rich reward, in which observation and experience can supply

materials to his imagination and his reason. In this field two great

discoveries have been already made. First, that there is a unity of plan in

nature, that the universe resembles a body in which all the limbs and

organs are connected with one another; and second, that all phenomena,

physical and moral, are subject to laws as invariable as those which

regulate the rising and setting of the sun. It is in reality as foolish to pray

for rain or a fair wind as it would be to pray that the sun should set in the

middle of the day. It is as foolish to pray for the healing of a disease or

for daily bread as it is to pray for rain or a fair wind. It is as foolish to

pray for a pure heart or for mental repose as it is to pray for help in

sickness or misfortune. All the events which occur upon the earth result

from law: even those actions which are entirely dependent on the caprices

of the memory or the impulse of the passions are shown by statistics to

be, when taken in the gross entirely independent of the human will. As a

single atom man is an enigma: as a whole he is a mathematical problem.

As an individual he is a free agent, as a species the offspring of necessity.

 

The unity of the universe is a scientific fact. To assert that it is the

operation of a single mind is a conjecture based upon analogy, and

analogy may be a deceptive guide. It is the most reasonable guess that

can be made, but still it is no more than a guess, and it is one by which

nothing after all is really gained. It tells us that the earth rests upon the

tortoise: it does not tell us on what the tortoise rests. God issued the laws

which manufactured the universe and which rule it in its growth. But

who made God? Theologians declare that he made himself, materialists

declare that matter made itself, and both utter barren phrases, idle words.

The whole subject is beyond the powers of the human intellect in its

present state. All that we can ascertain is this: that we are governed by

physical laws which it is our duty as scholars of Nature to investigate, and

by moral laws which it is our duty as citizens of Nature to obey.

 

The dogma of a single deity who created the heavens and the earth may

therefore be regarded as an imperfect method of expressing an undoubted

truth. Of all religious creeds it is the least objectionable from a scientific

point of view. Yet it was not a Greek who first discovered or invented

the one god, but the wild Bedouin of the desert. At first sight this appears

a very extraordinary fact. How, in a matter which depended entirely upon

the intellect, could these barbarians have preceded the Greeks, so far their

superiors in every other respect? The anomaly, however, can be easily

explained. In the first theological epoch every object and every

phenomenon of Nature was supposed to be a creature, in the second

epoch the dwelling or expression of a god. It is evident that the more

numerous the objects and phenomena, the more numerous would be the

gods, the more difficult it would be to unravel Nature, to detect the

connection between phenomena, to discover the unity which underlies

them all. In Greece there is a remarkable variety of climate and contour;

hills, groves, and streams diversify the scene; rugged, snow-covered

peaks and warm coast lands with waving palms lie side by side. But in

the land of the Bedouins Nature may be seen in the nude. The sky is

uncovered; the earth is stripped and bare. It is as difficult for the

inhabitants of such a country to believe that there are many gods as for

the people of such a land as Greece to believe that there is only one. The

earth and the wells and some uncouth stones, the sun, the moon, and the

stars are almost the only materials of superstition that the Bedouin can

employ; and