elements in the ancient civilizations, Rome perfected the political. If the first was the heir of Egypt, Babylon, and Phoenicia, the second was the heir of Assyria. Rome deified law, embodied authority and justice, realized political unity. A Roman has described for us her mission, and great as he conceives it to have been we may well allow that it was still greater.

"Excudent alii spirantia mollius æra,

Credo equidem, vivos ducent de marmore voltus ;
Orabunt causas melius, cœlique meatus

Describent radio, et surgentia sidera dicent :

Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento;
Hæ tibi erunt artes; pacisque imponere morem,
Parcere subjectis, et debellare superbos.

We can follow our subject no further.

Enough has been written to show the relation of ancient and modern civilization, of the people to the culture it creates. Here, as elsewhere, the first shall be last and the last first. The peoples earliest were not the most perfectly civilized. Many nations had to rise and fall before the elements of a rich and many-sided social being were evolved. And the more varied its elements the more permanent will be its existence. The early eminence of the Greeks had, perhaps, much to do with their premature decay. The greater strength of Rome might be due in part to her slower and more concentrated growth. The peoples most distant from the ancient cultures have not lost by having been the

* 66 Eneid," vi. 848-894.

last to be civilized. They were more mature when touched by the cultured peoples, and the culture that touched them was richer, more plastic and powerful. And now they, too, are working for the future, helping to form the men that are to be. "Generations are as the Days of toilsome mankind; Death and Birth are the vesper and the matin bells that summon Mankind to sleep, and to rise refreshed for new advancement. What the father has made the son can make and enjoy; but has also work of his own appointed him. Thus all things wax and roll onwards; arts, establishments, opinions, nothing is completed, but ever completing. Find Mankind where thou wilt, thou findest it in living movement, in progress faster or slower: the Phoenix soars aloft, hovers with outstretched wings, filling Earth with her music; or, as now, she sinks, and with spheral swan-song immolates herself in flame, that she may soar the higher and sing the clearer."*

* Carlyle, "Sartor Resartus," bk. iii. chap. vii.

PART III.

THE RACES IN RELIGION.

I.

WHILE the collective human race has been as a rule

religious, Man has exhibited in his religions every variety of type and degree of difference lying between the rudest Fetichism and the most refined and abstract Monotheism. They have embodied ideas at once so antithetic and akin, that religion can be made a point specifically distinguishing savage from civilized races, or a generic characteristic of man as man. Here the object of worship is a stone, or tree, or rude charm; there, the high and holy One who inhabiteth eternity. In one place the worship has been glad and lightsome, has loved the festive garland, the mystic dance, and the exultant hymn; in another it has been fearful and sombre, seeking by pain and penance, by human or animal sacrifices, to propitiate angry deities. Now it has been a simple act of devotion which the patriarch or father could perform, and again, an

extensive and burdensome ceremonial, sacred and significant in the minutest particulars, which an initiated and consecrated priest was needed to celebrate. Sometimes the simplicity has been carried so far as to seem Atheism to a foreigner accustomed to a more elaborate ritual. At others, the ceremonialism has determined the very social and political constitution, and made the nation appear not so much a people with a priesthood as a priesthood with a people. The varieties are so many, that classification is here peculiarly difficult, and the difficulty is increased by inquirers failing to agree on a principle of division. The theologian, ethnographer, comparative mythologist, historian of opinion, has each a classification suited to his own province, inapplicable to any other. Only one thing is clear-Religion is as universal as man, but as varied in type as the races and nations of men.*

The universality admits of but one explanation—the universal is the necessary. What man has everywhere done he could not but do. His nature is creative of religion, is possessed of faculties that make him religious. Religion is not an invention or discovery, but a product or deposit, a growth from roots fixed deep in human nature, springing up and expanding according to necessary laws. No one discovered sight or invented hearing. Man saw because he had eyes, heard because he had ears: the sense

* Waitz, “Anthropology," vol. i. pp. 277 ff. (Engl. trans.). Tylor's Primitive Culture," vol. i. 378 ff.

created the sensations. Language, too, is neither a discovery nor an invention. It grew, and man was hardly conscious of its growth; grew out of the physical ability to utter sounds and the mental capacity to think thoughts which, as allied, we term the faculty of speech. And so religion is the fruit of faculties given in our nature, spontaneously acting. Hence man gets into religion as into other natural things, the use of his senses, his mother tongue, without conscious effort, but to get out of it he has to use art, to reason himself into an attitude of watchful antagonism at once to the tendencies and action of his own nature and to ancient and general beliefs. No man is an atheist by nature or birth, only by artifice and education, and art when it vanquishes nature is not always a victor. The world has before now seen a mind which had cast out religion as worship of God, introduce a religion which worshipped man, or rather idolized the memory of a woman.

Religion, then, as natural is universal-as universal ast the natures which deposit and realize it. But the very reason of its universality explains its varieties. The creative natures are, while everywhere existing, everywhere varied. Minds, while akin as minds, are variously conditioned and endowed. Man, wherever he thinks and acts, must think and act as man, obedient to the laws built, as it were, into his very nature, but his power to think and act may exhibit the utmost differences of quality and degree.