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.I.

The same primary principles everywhere appear, CHAP. modified by the social state, the local circumstances, the civil customs, the imaginative or practical character of the people. Each state of social culture has its characteristic theology, self-adapted to the intellectual and moral condition of the people, and coloured in some degree by the habits of life. In the rudest and most savage races we find a gross superstition, called by modern foreign writers, Fetichism*, in which the shapeless stone, the Fetichism. meanest reptile, any object however worthless or insignificant, is consecrated by a vague and mysterious reverence, as the representative of an unseen Being. The beneficence of this deity is usually limited to supplying the wants of the day, or to influencing the hourly occurrences of a life, in which violent and exhausting labour alternates either with periods of sluggish and torpid indolence, as among some of the North American tribes; or, as among the Africans, with wild bursts of thoughtless

present century. M. Constant has placed the evils of sacerdotal influence in the strongest light, and disguised or dissembled its advantages. The ancient priestly castes, I conceive, attained their power over the rest of their race by their acknowledged superiority; they were the benefactors, and thence the rulers of their people: to retain their power, as the people advanced, they resorted to every means of keeping men in ignorance and subjection, and so degenerated into the tyrants of the human mind. At all events, sacerdotal domi

nation (and here M. Constant
would have agreed with us) is alto-
gether alien to genuine Chris-
tianity.

*The Fetiche of the African
is the Manitou of the American
Indian. The word Fetiche was first,
I believe, brought into general use
in the curious volume of the Pre-
sident De Brosses, Du Culte des
Dieux Fétiches.
The word was
formed by the traders to Africa,
from the Portuguese, Fetisso, chose
fée, enchantée, divine, ou rendant
des oracles. De Brosses, page 18.

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merriment. * This Fetichism apparently survived in more polished nations, in the household gods, perhaps in the Teraphim, and in the sacred stones (the Boetylia), which were thought either to have fallen from heaven, or were sanctified by immemorial reverence.

In the Oriental pastoral tribes, Tsabaism†, the simpler worship of the heavenly bodies, in general prevailed; which among the agricultural races grew up into a more complicated system, connecting the periodical revolutions of the sun and moon with the pursuits of husbandry. It was Nature-worship, simple in its primary elements, but branching out into mythological fables, rich and diversified in proportion to the poetic genius of the people. This Nature-worship in its simpler, probably its earlier form, appears as a sort of dualism, in which two great antagonist powers, the creative and destructive, Light and Darkness, seem contending for the sovereignty of the world, and, emblematical of moral good and evil, are occupied in pouring the full horn of fertility and blessing, or the vial of wrath and misery, upon the human race. Subordinate to, or as a modification of, these two conflicting powers, most of the Eastern races concurred in deifying the active and passive powers of generation. The sun and the earth, Osiris and Isis, formed

* Hume (History of Nat. Religion) argues that a pure and philosophical theism could never be the creed of a barbarous nation struggling with want.

The astral worship of the East is ably and clearly developed in an Excursus at the end of Gesenius's Isaiah.

CHAP.
I.

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a second dualism. And it is remarkable how widely,
almost universally extended throughout the earlier
world, appears the institution of a solemn period
of mourning about the autumnal, and of rejoicing
about the vernal, equinox.* The suspension, or ap-
parent extinction of the great † vivifying power
of nature, Osiris or Iacchus; the destitution of Ce-
res, Isis, or the Earth, of her husband or her beau-
tiful daughter, torn in pieces or carried away into
their realms by the malignant powers of darkness
their re-appearance in all their bright and fertilising
energy; these, under different forms, were the
great annual fast and festival of the early heathen
worship. But the poets were the priests of this Poets.
Nature-worship; and from their creative imagination
arose the popular mythology, which gave its
rate deity to every part of animate or inanimate
being; and, departing still farther from the primi-
tive allegory, and the symbolic forms under which

sepa

* Plutarch, de Iside et Osi- Gaul and Britain, as in India and ride:Φρύγες τὸν θεὸν οἰόμενοι Syria, without some such common χειμῶνος καθεύδειν, δ' Xεiμwvos μèv kaleúdεiv, dépovs origin. See Picart's large work, ἐγρηγορέναι, τότε μὲν κατευνασμούς Cérémonies et Coutumes Religi τότε δ ̓ ἀνεγέρσεις βακχεύοντες αὐτῷ euses, passim. τελοῦσι. Παφλαγόνες· δὲ καταδεῖσθαι καὶ καθείργνυσθαι χειμῶνος, ἦρος δὲ ἀναλύεσθαι φάσκουσι.

+ Bohlen (das Alte Indien, p. 139. et seq.) gives a long list of these festivals of the sun. Lobeck (i. 690.) would altogether deny their symbolical character. It is difficult, however, to account for the remarkable similarity between the usages of so many distinct nations in the New World as well as the Old, in Peru and Florida, in

Compare likewise Dr. Pritch-
ard's valuable work on Egyptian
Mythology; on the Deification of
the Active and Passive Powers of
Generation; the Marriage of the
Sun and the Earth, p. 40., and
pp. 62-75.

Nam rudis ante illos, nullo discrimine, vita
In speciem conversa, operum ratione ca-
rebat,

Et stupefacta novo pendebat lumine mundi.
Tum velut amissis mærens, tum læta re-
natis

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I.

the phenomena of the visible world were embodied, wandered into pure fiction; till nature-worship was almost supplanted by religious fable: and hence, by a natural transition, those who discerned God in every thing, multiplied every separate part of creation into a distinct divinity. The mind fluctuated between a kind of vague and unformed pantheism, the deification of the whole of nature, or its animation by one pervading power or soul, and the deification of every object which impressed the mind with awe or admiration.* While every nation, every tribe, every province, every town, every village, every family, had its peculiar, local, or tutelar deity, there was a kind of common neutral ground on which they all met, a notion that the gods in their collective capacity exercised a general controlling providence over the affairs of men, interfered, especially on great occasions, and, though this belief was still more vague and more inextrica

* Some able writers are of opinion that the reverse of this was the case that the variety was the primary belief; the simplification the work of a later and more intellectual age. On this point A. W. Schlegel observes," The more I investigate the ancient history of the world, the more I am convinced that the civilised nations set out from a purer worship of the Supreme Being; that the magic power of Nature over the imagination of the successive human races, first, at a later period, produced polytheism, and, finally, altogether obscured the more spiritual religious notions in the popular belief; while the wise alone preserved within

The my

the sanctuary the primeval secret.
Hence mythology appears to me
the last developed and most change-
able part of the old religion. The
divergence of the various mytho-
logies, therefore, proves nothing
against the descent of the religions
from a common source.
thologies might be locally formed,
according to the circumstances of
climate or soil; it is impossible to
mistake this with regard to the
Egyptian myths." Schlegel, p. 16.
Preface to Pritchard's Egyptian
Mythology. My own views, con-
sidering the question in a purely
historical light, coincide with those
of M. Schlegel.

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bly involved in fable, administered retribution in
another state of being. And thus even the com-
mon language of the most polytheistic nations ap-
proached to monotheism.*

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caste.

Wherever, indeed, there has been a great priestly Priestly caste, less occupied with the daily toils of life, and advanced beyond the mass of the people, the primitive nature-worship has been perpetually brought back, as it were, to its original elements; and, without disturbing the popular mythological religion, furnished a creed to the higher and more thinking part of the community, less wild and extravagant.† In Persia the Magian order retained or acquired something like a pure theism, in which the Supreme Deity was represented under the symbol of the primal uncreated fire; and their Nature-worship, under the form of the two conflicting principles, preserved much more of its original simplicity than in most other countries. To the influence of a distinct sacerdotal order may be traced ‡, in India, the singular union

* This is strikingly expressed by a Christian writer: "Audio vulgus cum ad cœlum manus tendunt, nihil aliud quam Deum dicunt, et Deus magnus est, et Deus verus est, et si Deus dederit. Vulgi iste naturalis sermo est, an Christiani confitentis oratio?" Min. Fel. Octavius. The same thought may be found in Cyprian, de Van. Idol., and Tertullian, Apolog.

+ This is nowhere more openly professed than in China. The early Jesuit missionaries assert that the higher class (the literatorum secta) despised the idolatry of the

vulgar. One of the charges against
the Christians was their teaching
the worship of one God, which
they had full liberty to worship
themselves, to the common people:

“Non æque placere, rudem ple-
beculam rerum novarum cupidi-
tate, cœli Dominum venerari." "Tri-
gault, Exped. in Sinas, pp. 438
-575.

"The learned brahmins adore one God, without form or quality, eternal, unchangeable, and occupying all space: but they carefully confine these doctrines to their own schools, as dangerous; and teach in public a religion, in which,

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