THE FAITHS OF THE WORLD.1

THIS volume, consisting of twelve Lectures delivered in 1881-2 in what it is now the fashion to call the Cathedral of S. Giles, Edinburgh, and also in Glasgow, will be found very instructive and full of interest. The Lectures should indeed be read by every educated person who has the opportunity, and by every one who is seeking to educate himself. With the exception of the religion of Assyria, which from some cause or other is omitted, and which might well have shared the Lecture on the Religion of Persia, which is really the worst in the volume, we have here a comparative view of all the known religions of the world,—of all i.e. which their respective votaries have been able to describe.

We

And here at the outset let us do justice to the several writers. rose from the perusal of the lectures with a much higher sense of the ability-literary and philosophical-of the Kirk Ministers than we before possessed. They are written in good nervous English, and, saving the lecture on Judaism, in a reverent spirit, while the lecturers appear to be quite at home in the most recent investigations which have been made into the wide and important subject on which they treat.

The volume opens with two lectures on the Religions of India by "the Very (?) Rev. John Caird, Principal of the University of Glasgow." The first inhabitants of the country called India, belonged there is reason to believe to the Turanian race. These were displaced by the immigration between 2000 and 1500 B.C. by a portion of the great Aryan family coming down from some part of the table land of Central Asia. And the religion which they held is what is found in those Vedic Hymns which have only recently been made known to English readers, through the labours of three Oxford Professors, Wilson, Max Müller, and Monier Williams. Very simple are the ideas which these hymns put forth, amounting to a deification of those forces of nature on which the writers felt their dependence, as wind, and fire, and water, &c. All these however seem to have pointed to One Supreme Being, who was over all: "There is but One," says one of the writers, "though the poets call Him by many names."

These very simple notions were at a later date, which it is not easy to fix, developed into the complex system called Brahmanism, a name

1 "The Faiths of the World; a Concise History of the Great Religious Systems of the World." Blackwood, Edinburgh and London.

derived from Brahma, one of the triad of gods which the system commemorates, and administered by the Brahmins or Brahmans, who constitute the priestly caste. The system, as has been said, is complex; but the addition made to the Vedic system may be said to consist chiefly in these two points,-1. The realisation of a Personal God; and 2. The institution of a very elaborate code of laws regulating both the functions of the priesthood and the method of approaching the Deity in worship by the people. As happens to all human systems, Brahmanism speedily degenerated; an empty ceremonialism taking the place of spirituality. Then about 500 B.C. there arose in the person of Buddha, (his real name was Gautama,) a great religious reformer who strove to revive and improve the earlier Pantheistic idea, and to enforce a code of strict morality,—a morality which seems at times almost to touch the Christian standard. By degrees Buddhism became corrupted, and so lost its hold on India, till in the twelfth century of our era it well-nigh ceased to exist,-India henceforward being divided between Hinduism (or Brahmanism) and Mahometanism. It has penetrated nevertheless into China and Japan, Thibet, the Corea, and specially into Ceylon, which is considered the sacred land of Buddhism. Practically Buddhism does not recognise the existence of GOD, or of immortality, the soul of the righteous, according to this view, after a series of transmigrations, only aiming at what is called Nirvana, i.e., extinction. Among the common people, it has degenerated into a kind of devil-worship accompanied by all manner of incantations and dances, and specially as death approaches. The number of Buddhists is reckoned to be about four hundred and seventy millions,1 exceeding the number of Christians throughout the world by considerably more than a hundred millions.

We come now to another of the great religions of the East,—that namely, which takes its name from Confucius. Confucius was contemporary with Buddha; and the religion which he founded was the very opposite of Buddhism. "As we pass," says one of the lecturers, "from the lofty aspirations of the Brahmin, and from the mystic earnestness of the Buddhist, we feel instinctively that we are descending from the mountain into the plain, and that the era of poetry is giving

1 This calculation seems certainly made in excess,-and particularly it is in error in calculating all the inhabitants of China and Japan to be Buddhists. The State religion of China is Confucianism; the people in general hold a kind of amalgam of Confucianism and Buddhism.

place to the age of prose." The line which Confucius took was not to trouble his disciples with difficult questions concerning the nature of GOD, and the relations in which man stands to Him. The one principle which he propounded was that of duty as between man and man, which he carried so far as apparently to have anticipated the golden rule of the Gospel, "Whatsoever ye would not that others should do to you, do ye not unto them." But China alone was to be the stage on which this theory of morals was to be exhibited, and a doctrine which is not based upon a motive was not likely to be a power in the world. So it happened, that although China was intentionally closed against the foreigner, the religion of Buddha contrived to make its way into the Celestial Empire, (Confucius proposed literally to make it a heaven upon earth,) and it is difficult to say how far the influence and teaching of Confucius still survives there.

The last of the four great Asiatic religions of antiquity is Zoroasterism, which had its home in Persia,-but at what date its author lived is quite uncertain. Some think that he was contemporary with Buddha and Confucius, but most persons incline to a much earlier date, possibly a thousand years earlier. The chief characteristic of this religion was that it sought to combine the speculative and the practical. The existence of evil in this world which in so many ways bears witness to the goodness and love of its Creator, is a problem which has perplexed mankind at all times. This Zoroaster undertook to solve by imagining the co-existence of two twin Deities-Ormuzd, the good God, and Ahriman, the evil one. The great practical duty inculcated by Zoroaster was truthfulness.

An earlier form of religion which existed in Persia was the worship of the heavenly bodies, which was happily inconsistent with idolatry; and it was owing probably to the survival of this early creed which involved a careful observation of the heavens, that the Wise Men, noticing an unusual phenomenon in the sky, were led to come and seek the new-born SAVIOUR at His Incarnation. Along however with these high ideas there was mingled among the Persians a degrading worship, or something approaching to worship, of certain of the lower animals, and of great cruelty towards others. Stability was not to be found in such an inconsistent religion as this. Zoroasterism fell an easy prey to Mahometanism, and no wonder, for the religion of Mahomet, while skilfully adapted to some of the lower parts of human nature, teaches unmistakably the great cardinal truth of one GOD supreme over

all. In India, nevertheless, there is a considerable body of Parsees, whose name betokens their Persian origin and who retain much of those good qualities of truth and energy which so honourably distinguished their ancestors.

Africa, it is of course well known, gave birth to two religions,—that of ancient Egypt, and the religion of Mahomet. The former alone falls within the scope of our present paper, and truly a wonderful and, in many respects, a most exalted ideal was realized in it. The people, as Herodotus tells us, were specially religious: they believed in a future state of existence, the condition of which was to depend on a divine judgment by a method which they very accurately described. This belief was expressed by the practice of embalming the bodies of the deceased, and the enormous pyramids which they built are to be regarded simply as monuments to the departed. Whether among the multitude of deities, male and female, which they worshipped, the idea of the Supreme Being was recognised by the Egyptians, is scarcely matter of certainty. Judging by the precepts found in their ancient documents, we should expect to find the highest moral excellence existing among the people. Unhappily it was quite otherwise. 'Both men and women," for women in Egypt had a higher position than in other countries, says the lecturer, were immodest and licentious in their behaviour. They were vindictive, treacherous, and avaricious, servile towards superiors, and cruel in their treatment of dependants." Further, there was mingled with this high theoretical morality a grotesque and debasing worship of animals. And then, when we come to inquire into its present condition, we find that it has been swept altogether from off the face of the earth. In the early ages of the Church, Christianity gained many converts in Egypt. Alexandria was one of the most famous Christian schools, and many were the saints and learned men produced from its border lands, as SS. Augustine and Cyprian, Tertullian and Origen. The dominant religion however here, as in Persia, is now that of the false Prophet Mahomet.

We pass now into Europe, and here we have the two great nations of antiquity, the Greeks and the Romans, who successively became the conquerors of the world. Here we have surer records to trust to in our investigations, and here art and science, and mental culture attained the highest perfection of which man, unaided by revelation, is capable. A few lines only can be devoted to this part of the subject, which is better known and understood than are the histories of the Eastern nations whom we have before considered.

The religion of Greece in the earliest times was highly poetic and unpractical. There was a general sentiment, however, from whence arising it is not easy to say, to admire what was good and beautiful and true; and these good things, especially what was beautiful in nature, were supposed to be the abodes of their deities, who were always ready to sympathise with men in the struggles of life. It is this idea which is embodied in the two great epic poems of Homer. But at the time when we become acquainted with the history of Greece, a great intellectual wave had passed over the land, represented by the Tragedians, Eschylus and Sophocles, by the historian Thucydides, and still more by the giant intellects of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Of these, the former, for poetic purposes, used the popular mythology mingling with it high moral sentiments; the pages of Thucydides are concerned simply with facts; while the three great philosophers, ignoring rather than contradicting the current views of their countrymen, proceed in a tentative manner to propound those deep views of truth which have been the delight of all subsequent ages. In all this we should scarcely discover the existence of the popular theology, as it may be called, had we not learnt that the hostility of its professional guardians had been aroused, which vented itself, as all know, in procuring a sentence of death against Socrates on the ground that he was a depraver of the national gods.

The religion of Rome was of a very different character, having its root in the conception of the family, as the unit from which the State was evolved. Thus, on entering a Roman house, the first chamber was the atrium or hall, in which all the family met for the social meal. In this was the focus or hearth, and near to it, or forming part of it, was an altar, on which burned night and day the sacred fire. The altar was dedicated to the Lares or Penates, i.e. the household gods, who were in fact the spirits of the departed. So also the mother deity of Rome was the goddess of the hearth or Vesta, whose worship was attended by the guild of vestal virgins, daughters of the chief families in Rome. It was this simple faith that sanctified every stage of human existence—such as birth and marriage, and every act and event of domestic life; and it was this fundamental religiousness of the people that made the Romans to be as truthful and upright and self-denying as we find them to be at the best periods of their history. By degrees, however, these simple ideas became corrupted, chiefly by intercourse with other nations, from whom the Romans were ever ready to copy. As a consequence of this commixture, there arose among the best citizens of the Republic, before the