or nearly all, the sacrificial ritual of the Greeks. Consequently, St. Paul exhorted his converts to avoid these communions of the heathen. "Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of devils; ye cannot be partakers of the Lord's table, and of the table of devils." 1 “If any man see thee which hast knowledge sit at meat in the idol's temple, shall not the conscience of him which is weak be emboldened to eat those things which are offered to idols ? " 2

What the Egyptions related of the death of Osiris, who was slain by his brother Typhon and his accomplices, and whose body was cut up into twenty-six pieces, which were cast into the Nile, and all but one recovered by Isis, resembles the Orphic myth of Zagreus.

Among the ancient Hindoos, Soma was a chief deity; he is called the giver of life and of health, the protector, he who is the guide to immortality. He became incarnate among men, was taken by them and slain, and brayed in a mortar. But he rose in flame to heaven, to be the benefactor of the world and the mediator between God and man. Through communion with him in his sacrifice man has an assurance of immortality, for by that sacrament he obtains union with his divinity. "O Soma!" the Hindoo is taught to pray by the Veda, "thou art the strength of our heroes and the death of our enemies. . . . invincible in war, fulfil our vows in battle. . . . fight for us! none can resist thee; give us superiority!" "O, Soma immortal, may we drink of thee and be immortal like thee!" 3

The whole mythologic legend of the Soma is nothing but the allegorical history of the plant Sarcostemma viminalis, which is regarded with passionate love, because of the intoxicating liquor which is derived from its juice. It is re

1 1 Cor. x., 21, 28.

3 Veda, in Langlois, Mem. sur la Divinité Soma.

2 1 Cor. viii. 10.

garded as a god-send; the way in which it is prepared is by crushing it in a mortar; the juice is then thrown on the sacrificial flame, and so rises to heaven.

A similar worship existed among the Iranians, but they did not ferment the Homa, as they called it, and though to it they attributed divinity, they did not make it a Supreme god, as did the Hindoos. With both, the partaking of the juice was regarded as a sacramental act, by virtue of which the receiver was embued with a portion of the divine nature.

1

Cannibalism is nearly always a religious act; among the rudest peoples it is practised on the supposition that with the flesh the eater assimilates the spirit of the victim, and thus there ensues great competition over a courageous adversary, each warrior being ambitious of eating him that he may obtain his valor. When the heroic Jesuit, Brébeuf, was tortured by the Iroquois, the savages were so astonished at his endurance that they "laid open his breast, and came in a crowd to drink the blood of so valiant an enemy, thinking to imbibe with it some portion of his courage. A chief then tore out his heart and devoured it." Like torture, anthropophagism was among the Indians partly an act of vengeance, and partly a religious act. "If the victim had shown courage, the heart was first roasted, cut into small pieces, and given to the young men and boys, who devoured it to increase their own courage. The body was then divided, thrown into kettles, and eaten by the assembly, the head being the portion of the chief." The Miamis have among them a clan of man-eaters whose hereditary duty and privilege it is to devour the bodies of prisoners burned to death. The act has a religious character, and is attended with ceremonial observances. It is much the same

1 Parkman: Jesuits in Canada, p. 289.

2 Ibid., p. 39.

2

among the New-Zealanders. "Of the slain," says a Maori chief, some are cooked and eaten. The first man killed is made sacred to the Atua, in order to propitiate him. He is thus disposed of: His heart is cut out and stuck on the top of a post. His ear and some of the hair of his head are preserved to be used at the ceremony called Feed-wind. The ear is for the female Ariki.of the tribe, to eat in the ceremony called Ruahine, by which the war-party are made free. The heart is for the male Ariki, to eat at the ceremony called Tautane. The second person slain is also sacred, the priest alone being permitted to eat his flesh."1

The notion that the consumption of the heart or blood of a brave man communicates valor to the consumer is simple and natural enough. The idea of sacred communion is more complex. The victim being made over to the god, becomes part, so to speak, of the god, and by the communicant feeding on the victim he becomes a partaker thereby of that which not only belongs to God, but is assimilated into God. The victim is, what Hegel would call, the synthetic moment between the mutual contradictories God and man.

The act of sacrifice is always regarded as uniting most intimately the victim with the god. Thus, Tohil, the Moloch of the Quiches, we have seen in the preceding chapter demanding the union of the native tribes with him. This they accept, and discover when too late that this union signifies the sacrifice of themselves. The partaking of the sacrifice is regarded as the union of the votary with the god, by union with the victim, and it is on this theory that a sacramental eating almost invariably forms the complement of every sacrificial act.

1 Shortland: Traditions of New Zealand, p. 247; 1856.

CHAPTER XX.

THE HUMAN IDEALS.

The necessity of an Ideal.—When God is the essence of abstraction, hero-worship steps in.-Types of heroes worshipped.-The theory of hero-worship.-The ideal of beauty-of dignity.-The female ideal.-Mary, the Christian female ideal.

HA

ABITS make the man, and habits obtain through imitation. If man has a good pattern before him, he will copy that; if provided with a bad one, he will grow up with habits that are bad. An ideal is necessary to him as a progressive animal. If he is to advance, he must see something ahead of him to attract him forward. He must believe that imperfection is not essential, and that perfection is obtainable. To form an ideal is to refuse acquiescence in facts, to feel conviction that circumstances are made by man, and not man by circumstances. The tendency of the mind to exaggerate is a manifestation of the faculty of idealization. A brute never supposes any thing to be better or worse than it really is. But not so man: he pitches his conception of good and bad above experience; he is disposed to enhance the virtues or vices of every person with whom he is acquainted, so that it is always a disappointment and a surprise to him when he finds that his estimate has exceeded what exists.

In the first Theopoeic age God was every quality idealized; but as the only qualities then appreciated were envy, rage, and force, God was regarded as the most envious, furious, and powerful existence conceivable. When, how

ever, the notion of God was disengaged from human passions, and became more and more absolute, it lost its qualification as the ideal of humanity, and remained the ideal of abstract qualities; then arose hero-worship, a necessary reaction, for God having ceased to be human, deified mortals were elevated to the position of exemplars, vacated by God.

The ideal is formed by purifying human nature, by abstracting from it all that is odious and imperfect, and by sublimating all that is good. This abstraction is not arbitrary, but is determined by the point of view at which men stand: such as is their mode of living, such is their mode of thought, and such also is their mode of abstraction. This abstraction is at once affirmative and negative. What man esteems, that is to him God. The Mexican deified salt, and the Finn adored the wash-tub. What is imperfect is rejected, what is essential is distinguished from what is accidental, what is good from what is bad. When the Deity becomes the essence of intellectual qualities of order, volition, and wisdom, he ceases to be idealized human nature, and men seek in a middle region between earth and heaven an ideal of love, courage, beauty, and justice. The conception of an absolute intelligence is too frigid, too remote from man, for him to be able to take it to heart. He demands a sensible object about which his imagination may play, and this he finds either in the deification of man, or in the incarnation of God.

Almost all religions present us with examples of heroworship, for this reason, that human types of excellence are necessary for the education of man. Where no hero-worship exists, there we find no advance in civilization; for those few races who are without human ideals are thereby destitute of incentives to perfection. The lowest type of deified hero is the man of vast bodily strength. Every nation has its ideal of brute force, who strangles serpents, tears lions, and