ART. II. THE EARLIEST CREED OF MANKIND. THE sacred books of Judaism and of Christianity describe the first human beings as having stood in direct personal fellowship with the personal Creator of the world, as having received instruction and commandments from him, as having at length, in consequence of disobedience, been dispossessed of Eden and subjected to a new, providential, and gracious administration devised for their salvation. They teach that the descendants of the first human pair recognized, by offerings and sacrifices, the being and claims of the Supreme God, and that for a long timecertainly till after the Flood-a line of pious patriarchs maintained in the wicked world the profession and testimony of monotheistic believers. The Koran is pervaded by the same idea. To Mohammed, no less than to Moses and Paul, the theism of revelation was the primitive faith of mankind; polytheism and its attendant idolatry were of later origin, and traceable to spiritual blindness and unbelief. In all three of the monotheistic religions of the world, therefore, men are conceived of as commencing their history with a supernatural knowledge of the one true and living God. In the Christian world the first noteworthy treatise expressing dissent from this view was from the pen of the English deist, David Hume. In his "Natural History of Religion," (published in 1755,) he lays down this as his first and fundamental proposition: "Polytheism was the primary Religion of Mankind." His first argument in support of this thesis is an appeal to the evidence of post-Christian history. He puts it thus: It is a matter of fact, incontestable, that about 1,700 years ago all mankind were polytheists. The doubtful and skeptical principles of a few philosophers, or the theism, and that not entirely too pure, of one or two nations, form no objection worth regarding. Behold, then, the clear testimony of history. The farther we mount into antiquity the more do we find mankind plunged into polytheism. No marks, no symptoms of any more perfect religion. The most ancient records of the human race still present us with that system as the popular and established creed. The North, the South, the East, the West, give their unanimous testimony to the same fact. What can be opposed to so full an evidence? The force of this passage consists almost exclusively in its cool positiveness of dogmatic assertion. Plainly, the condition of the majority of mankind 1,700 years ago affords no just criterion by which to judge of the condition of the race thousands of years before that. Indeed, to any believer in historic evolution of any sort, it would seem antecedently certain that the condition of men several thousand years after the commencement of their existence must be very different indeed from their primitive condition. But, furthermore, he grants that 1,700 years ago the prevalence of polytheism was, after all, not universal; there were "one or two nations" of theists, and even philosophers in other nations, who doubted the truth. of polytheism. It was absurd, therefore, to talk of "the unanimous testimony" of North and South, East and West. The second point urged by Hume is the improbability of the supposition that "a barbarous, necessitous animal, such as man is, on the first origin of society," a being "pressed by such numerous wants and passions," should have had either the disposition, or the capacity, or the leisure, so to study "the order and frame of the universe" as immediately to be led "into the pure principles of theism." He grants that a careful and philosophic consideration of the unity and order of the natural world is sufficient to conduct one to an assured belief in the being of one Supreme and Almighty Creator, but he says: "I can never think that this consideration could have an influence on mankind when they formed their first rude notions of religion." Assuming that the first men must necessarily have been "an ignorant multitude," he says: It seems certain that, according to the natural progress of human thought, the ignorant multitude must first entertain some groveling and familiar notion of superior powers before they stretch their conception to that perfect Being who bestowed order on the whole frame of nature. The force of this argument it is difficult to see. It all rests upon two assumptions: first, the assumption that the first men were the lowest barbarians-to use his own words, "barbarous, necessitous animals;" and, secondly, the assumption that there was, apart from the philosophic study of nature, no other way in which they could have obtained a belief in the existence of the Creator. As no religionist of any age has ever admitted these assumptions, and as Hume adduces no particle of proof 2-FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XXXVI. for either of them, this part of his argument is surely without force. His next and last point is the impossibility of the loss of the monotheistic faith if it had once been reached by the earliest He says: men. If men were at first led into the belief of one superior Being by reasoning from the frame of nature, they could never possibly leave [have left] that belief in order to embrace polytheism; but the same principles of reason which at first produced and diffused over mankind so magnificent an opinion, must be [have been] able, with greater facility, to preserve it. The first invention and proof of any doctrine is much more difficult than the supporting and retaining of it. Here our author appears to even poorer advantage than in either of his former arguments. In the first place, as before, he ignores the possibility of supposing a knowledge of God by means of a divine self-manifestation-thus covertly misrepresenting or evading the only point in debate. In the second place, the assertion, that if the first men had attained to a pure theism, they never could have left it and become polytheists, should be compared with his own later assertions in section viii, of the same treatise, where he describes what he, himself, calls the "Flux and Reflux of Polytheism and Theism." This section opens thus: It is remarkable that the principles of religion have a kind of flux and reflux in the human mind, and that men have a natural tendency to rise from idolatry to theism, and to sink again from theism into idolatry. The author then states his well-known theory of the origin of polytheism as the first form of religion, and his theory of the rise of monotheism out of polytheism. But when a people have thus reached a belief in a God possessed of "the attributes of unity and affinity, simplicity and spirituality," there comes so he declares-a natural relapse into polytheism. The explanation of this is given in these words: Such refined ideas [as those of pure monotheism] being somewhat disproportioned to vulgar comprehension, remain not long in their original. purity, but require to be supported by the notion of inferior mediators or subordinate agents, which interpose between mankind and their supreme deity. These demi-gods, or middle beings, partaking more of human nature, and being more familiar to us, become the chief objects of devotion. But as these idolatrous religions fall every day into grosser and more vulgar corruptions, they at last destroy themselves, and by the vile . representations which they form of their duties make the tide turn again toward theism. Thus monotheisin and polytheism are, to Hume, two opposites, between which the human mind forever oscillates. This being so, it is plain that this oscillation is grounded in reason, or it is not. If it is grounded in reason, then primitive men may have reasoned their way into monotheism as their first religious faith, and still have relapsed into polytheism as the natural and rational reaction. On the other hand, if the oscillation is not grounded in reason, then, as by his own account all later religious states of mankind have been unreasonable, the first may have been altogether different from what Hume would have considered rational; that is, may have been a state of pure monotheism. Such was Hume's attempted demonstration of the primitiveness of polytheism, and the whole of it. Five years later, in 1760, De Brosses, one of Voltaire's correspondents, published his crude but noteworthy book on "The Worship of Fetiches; or, Parallel of the Ancient Religion of Egypt with the present Religion of Nigritia." This was the writer who first gave currency to the word "Fetichism," and who first postulated it as the invariable antecedent of polytheism. De Brosses, however, was a professed believer in primeval divine revelation, and he made the Hebrews an exception to his general claim that all ancient nations began with fetichism, rose thence to polytheism, and tended thence toward monotheism. In the early part of the present century, however, Auguste Comte, ignoring any primeval revelation, elevated De Brosses's generalization into an absolute law of historic development. He gave the greater acceptability and influence to it by representing this law of theological progress as only part of a yet broader social law, according to which humanity, having traversed this "theological stage" in the manner indicated, passes next through a "metaphysical" one, and finally attains the "scientific" stage of atheistic positivism. In Germany, in 1795, Hume's opinion found an able representative in G. L. Bauer, of Altdorf, and ten years later we find Meiners, in his "Universal History of Religion," repeating and enforcing the notion of the absolute primitiveness of fetichism. The rationalistic and pantheistic tendencies of German speculation about this time, were, of course, favorable to any new theory which discredited the biblical one, and thus it came to pass that before the middle of the present century the De Brosses theory, in its completer Comtean form, became almost universally adopted. Speaking of its prevalence, Max Müller says: All of us have been brought up on it. I, myself, certainly held it for a long time, and never doubted it till I became more and more startled by the fact that, while in the earliest accessible documents of religious thought we look in vain for any very clear traces of fetichism, they become more and more frequent every-where in the latter stages of religious development, and are certainly more visible in the later corruptions of the Indian religion, beginning with the Atharvana, than in the earliest hymns of the "Rig Veda."* For many years our works on primeval history have been saturated with this idea. Even professedly Christian writers upon the history of religions, and upon Comparative Theology, have largely fallen in with the prevailing notion. As one has well said, "The very theory has become a kind of scientific fetich, though like most fetiches it seems to owe its existence to ignorance and superstition." For some time past, however, this long dominant dogma of naturalism has been losing credit with all careful students of the world's religions, and, indeed, with the more thorough professional ethnologists. In his recent work, "The Hibbert Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion," + Max Müller, himself for a long time, as we have seen, a believer in the theory, publicly challenges its correctness. In Lecture Second, after rapidly sketching the rise and remarkable prevalence of the theory, he exposes, with much acuteness and with his usual wealth of illustrative facts, the indiscriminateness with which the term fetichism has been currently used, and the worthlessness of evidence upon which Comte and others have relied. He sets forth, respectfully, but strongly, the inadequacy of their psychological exploration of the origin of fetichism, and shows that even the West African fetich-worshipers hold at the same time other views properly polytheistic, or, in some cases, even monotheistic. Summing up his own conclusions, he says: "Origin and Growth of Religions," Lond. and N. Y., 1879, p. 58. |