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. Pagan religion arose in 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,

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 one. 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,

י

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, mercly 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: