APPENDIX.

ADDITIONAL NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS.

NOTE A.-PAGAN RELIGION.

THE following estimate, though partial and one sided, of the moral value of the religions of the ancient heathen world, coming from one of the profoundest scholars of the age, de serves consideration. "All the moral theories of [pagan] antiquity were utterly disjoined from religion. The supposition that the ancient pagan systems of religion were introductory to some scheme of morals, is an anachronism. It is the anachronism of unconsciously reflecting back upon the ancient religions of darkness, and as if essential to all religions, features that never were suspected as possible, until they had been revealed by Christianity, [including Judaism.] Religion, in the eye of a pagan, had no more relation to morals than it had to ship building or trigonometry. But, then, why was religion honored among pagans? How did it ever arise? What was its object? Object! it had no object, if by this you mean ulterior object. no motive, but in an impulse. Pagan religion aimed at no distant prize ahead; it fled from a danger immediately behind. The gods of the pagans were wicked natures; but they were natures to be feared and to be propitiated; for they were fierce,

Pagan religion arose in

and they were moody, and (as regarded men, who had no wings) they were powerful. Once accredited as facts, the pagan gods could not be regarded as otherwise than terrific facts; and thus it was, that in terror, blind terror, as against power in the hands of divine wickedness, arose the ancient religions of paganism. Because the gods were wicked, man was religious; because Olympus was cruel, earth trembled; because the divine beings were the most lawless of Thugs, the human being became the most abject of sycophants.

"Had the religions of paganism arisen teleologically; that is, with a view to certain purposes, to certain final causes ahead; had they grown out of forward looking views, contemplating, for example, the furthering of civilization, or contemplating some interest, in a world beyond the present, there would probably have arisen, concurrently, a section on all such religions devoted to positive instruction. There would have been a doctrinal part. There might have been interwoven with the ritual of worship, a system of economies or a code of civil prudence, or a code of health, or even a secret revelation of mysterious relations between man and the Deity; all which existed in Judaism. But as the case stood, this was impossible. The gods were mere odious facts, like scorpions or rattlesnakes, having no moral aspects whatever; public nuisances; and bearing no relation to man but that of capricious tyrants. First arriving upon a basis of terror, these gods never subsequently enlarged that basis; nor sought to enlarge it. All antiquity contains not a hint of the possibility that love could arise, as by any ray mingling with the sentiments in a human creature towards a divine Not even sycophants pretended to love the gods. "Under this original peculiarity of paganism, there arose two consequences, which I will mark by the Greek letters a and B. The latter I will notice in its order, first calling the reader's attention to the consequence marked a, which is this: In the full and profoundest sense of the word believe,

one.

the pagans could not be said to believe in any gods; but in the ordinary sense, they did, and do, and must believe in all gods. As this proposition will startle some readers, and is yet closely involved in the main truth which I am now pressing, viz., the meaning and effect of a simple cultus, as distinguished from a high doctrinal religion, let us seek an illustration from our Indian empire. The Christian missionaries from home, when first opening their views to Hindoos, describe themselves as laboring to prove that Christianity is a true religion, and as either asserting, or leaving it to be inferred, that, on that assumption, the Indian religion is a false one. But the poor Hindoo never dreamed of doubting that the Christian was a true religion; nor will he at all infer, from your religion being true, that his own must be false. Both are true, he thinks: all religions are true; and all gods are true gods; and all are equally true. Neither can he understand what you mean by a false religion, or how a religion could be false; and he is perfectly right. Wherever religions consist only of a worship, as the Hindoo religion does, there can be no competition amongst them as to truth. That would be an absurdity, not less nor other than for a Prussian to denounce the Austrian emperor, or an Austrian to denounce the Prussian king, as a false sovereign. False? How false? In what sense false? Surely not as non-existing. But at least, (the reader will reply,) if the religions contradict each other, one of them must be false. Yes, but that is impossible. Two religions cannot contradict each other, where both contain only a cultus; they could come into collision only by means of a doctrinal or directly affirmative part, like those of Christianity and Mohammedanism. But this part is what no idolatrous religion ever had, or will have. The reader must not understand me to mean that, merely as a compromise of courtesy, two professors of different idolatries would agree to recognize each other. Not at all. The truth of one does not imply the falsehood of the other. Both are true as facts:

neither can be false, in any higher sense, because neither makes any pretence to truth doctrinal.

"This distinction between a religion having merely a worship, and a religion having also a body of doctrinal truth, is familiar to the Mohammedans; and they convey the distinction by a very appropriate expression. Those majestic religions, (as they esteem them,) which rise above the mere pomps and tympanies of ceremonial worship, they demonstrate religions of the book.' There are of such religions three, viz., Judaism, Christianity, and Islamism. The first builds upon the Law and the Prophets, or perhaps sufficiently upon the Pentateuch; the second upon the Gospel; the last upon the Koran. No other religion can be said to rest upon a book, or even to admit of a book. For we must not be duped by the case where a lawgiver attempts to connect his own human institutes with the venerable sanctions of a national religion, or the case where a learned antiquary unfolds historically the record of a vast mythology. Heaps of such cases (both law and mythological records) survive in the Sanscrit, and in the pagan languages. But these are books which build upon the religion, not books upon which the religion is built. If a religion consists only of a ceremonial worship, in that case there can be no opening for a book; because the forms and details publish themselves daily, in the celebration of the worship, and are preserved, from age to age, without dependence on a book. But, if a religion has a doctrine, this implies a revelation or message from Heaven, which cannot, in any other way, secure the transmission of the message to future generations, than by causing it to be registered in a book. A book, therefore, will be convertible with a doctrinal religion: no book, no doctrine; and again, no doctrine, no book.

"Upon these principles we may understand the second consequence, (marked B,) which has perplexed many men, viz., why it is, that the Hindoos, in our own times, but

equally, why it is that the Greek and Roman idolaters of antiquity, never proselytized; no, nor could have viewed such an attempt as rational. Naturally, if a religion is doctrinal, any truth which it possesses, as a secret deposit consigned to its keeping by a revelation, must be equally valid for one man as for another, without regard to race or nation. For a doctrinal religion therefore to proselytize, is no more than a duty of consistent humanity. You, the professors of that religion, possess the medicinal fountains. You will not diminish your own share by imparting it to others. What churlishness, if you should grudge to others a health which does not interfere with your own! Christians, therefore, Mohammedans, and Jews originally, in proportion as they were sincere and conscientious, have always invited or even forced, the unbelieving to their own faith: nothing but accidents of situations, local or political, have disturbed this effort. But on the other hand, for a mere 'cultus' to attempt conversions, is nonsense. An ancient Roman could have had no motive for bringing you over to the worship of Jupiter Capitolinus; nor you any motive for going. 'Surely, poor man,' he would have said, 'you have some god of your own, who will be quite as good for your countrymen as Jupiter for mine. But if you have not, really I am sorry for your case; and a very odd case it is; but I don't see how it could be improved by talking nonsense. You cannot beneficially, you cannot rationally, worship a tutelary Roman deity, unless in the character of a Roman; and a Roman you may become, legally and politically. Being such, you will participate in all advantages, if any there are, of our national religion; and without needing a process of conversion, either in substance or in form. Ipso facto, and without any separate choice of your own, or becoming a Roman citizen, you become a party to the Roman worship.' For an idolatrous religion to prose. lytize, would be not only useless, but unintelligible.' Quincey.

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