other hand, to resolve religion into the expression of subjective states, the externalization in forms and acts of the religious consciousness, are much more dangerous; because they contain, in so far as the one seeks order and progress in the history of humanity, and the other the explanation of the various ethnical religions in the nature and faculties of man, elements of neglected but most significant truths. Our essay, which is meant to deal, more or less directly, with each of these phases of modern thought, falls into two parts. The first will discuss the genesis of the idea of God, therefore the question raised by Science. The second will discuss the development of the idea, therefore the question raised by every theory of evolution, whether coming from the transcendental or positivist side.

I.

Natural Histories of Religion are as old as Scepticism. Doubt has always been forced, all the more because exceptional, to justify itself against belief. Coarse or shallow minds have snatched at the readiest and least creditable explanation. Religion is an invention of priests, or poets, or rulers. This explanation was not unknown to the ancient world, figured largely in the anti-religious French and English literature of last century, and still plays a part in the lower infidel discussions of to-day. But the explanation is so manifestly superficial and unsatisfactory, that it falls to

pieces the moment the inquiry becomes earnest and searching. Subtler minds saw that a phenomenon so universal as religion must have its roots in the nature of man, and his relation to the world around him. Hence the Epicurean, who hated a curiosum et plenum negotii deum,* held that fear had created the gods. The terrible forms seen in dreams, the system of the heavens, the seasons, tempests, meteors, and lightnings, created the notion of invisible or spiritual beings, of gods, and the terror, which they inspired gave birth to religion.† Hume, with a rare subtlety of analysis and felicity of illustration, tried to evolve the idea of gods out of the ignorance and fear that personified the "unknown causes of the accidents and eccentricities of Nature, the idea of one God or Monotheism out of the gradual concentration of flattery and offerings on one of these personifications. Hence Polytheism was the deification of many unknown causes of natural phenomena; Monotheism, the deification of one unknown cause. Dupuis held that all religions had their origin

* Cicero, "De Nat. Deor.," lib. i. 20.

Sext. Empir. Adv. Math., ix. 25; Lucretius, v. 1161-1240. The notion that fear is the mother of religion runs through the whole poem of Lucretius and crops out everywhere. Yet the fine invocation of Alma Venus, with which his poem opens, shows what a fascination the idea of the divine had for him. It was the actual religion he saw around him which he hated, for "Sæpius illa Religio peperit scelerosa atque impia facta" (i. 82).

"Natural History of Religion," sections i-viii.

in a worship of nature pure and simple, and that "les Dieux sont enfans des hommes." * But he did not explain the one thing needing explanation-how and why man had begun to worship at all. Comte supposed the primitive Fetichism to rise from infant or savage, by a tendency which they had in common with dog or monkey, ascribing to natural objects, organic or inorganic, a life analogous to their own.† Sir John Lubbock thinks that the rudest savages, representatives of aboriginal man, are actual Atheists, and describes the transition to Fetichism § somewhat as Lucretius did,-the explanation of the Roman Epicurean, however, being, on the whole, the more philosophic and elevated. Herbert Spencer considers that the rudimentary form of all religion is the propitiation of dead ancestors, who are supposed to be still existing, and to be capable of working good or ill to their descendants. Mr. Darwin's theory is eclectic, and seems to combine the various elements of an ascription of life to natural objects, dreams, and fears. T

*

66

'Origine de Cultes," vol. i. p. viii. and pp. 3-42.

"Cours de Philos. Posit.," vol. v. p. 37.

"Origin of Civilization," p. 119.

§ The main factors in the change are dreams (p. 126), disease (p. 131), divination, and sorcery (p. 141); see also p. 221.

|| Fortnightly Review, vol. vii. (N.S.) p. 536. Mr. Spencer has now more fully developed his views, profusely illustrating them, as his way is, in his "Principles of Sociology," cc. ix. ff. I regret that they cannot be here noticed in detail. Chap. xx., on "Ancestor-Worship in general," specially invites criticism, were it only for the curious misapprehensions it contains. "Descent of Man," vol. i. pp. 65-68.

Re

An analytic and categorical criticism of these Natural Histories of Religion cannot be attempted here and now. But it may be observed that, amid minor differences, they agree in their three main propositions-(1) that man was originally destitute of religious belief; (2) that delusions due to ignorance, fear, or dreams were the causes of his earliest faith; and (3) that the primitive religion was one of terror, a series of rude attempts to propitiate supposed unfriendly beings. ligion is thus derived from the lower faculties and passions of man, and, as a necessary result, its form is low-lower, one would think, than the aboriginal Atheism. It is, too, in its nature false and delusive, without objective reality, the creation of miserable ignorance and trembling fear, a very torment to the minds that had created it. It is hard to see how a religion so produced, and of such a nature, could be otherwise than injurious to man, its terrors fatal to his incipient moral nature, its delusions bewildering and oppressive to his intellect, its entire influence tending to throw the savage back into the animalism from which he had lately emerged. Such a religion could only increase the difficulties in the way of progress, make civilization less possible. Then, how can the admitted virtues and graces of religion be evolved from this barbarous faith? Ex nihilo nihil fit. The highest moral qualities do not spring from the lowest. This "Natural History of

Religion" would require an inverted actual history of religion, the reversal of its historical place in society and the State. It is not without significance that, while M. Comte was introducing his law of evolution to the world, finding the roots of religion in Fetichism and the final and perfect system in a Positivism without God, the two profoundest thinkers then living were formulating very different doctrines-the one the doctrine that a nation and its religion rose together, that, apart from religion, a nation, with its institutions and laws, was impossible; * the other, that "the religion and foundation of a State are one and the same, in and for themselves identical," and that "the people who has a bad conception of God has also a bad State, bad government, and bad laws."+

*

Before finally dismissing these theories, it may be

Schelling, "Philosophie der Mythologie,” i. 63.

+ Hegel, "Religions-philosophie," i. p. 241. A sketch of the German philosophies of religion, in so far as they touch the genesis of the idea of God, although a very tempting subject, is not one that can be touched within the limits of a short essay. It would have to start with Lessing, Herder, and Kant, and come down to the younger Fichte, Von Hartmann, and Pfleiderer, and would lead us into the very heart of the questions that have agitated the German philosophic schools for now almost a century. German thought on this matter forms, on the whole, an admirable counteractive to English and French. The elements the one ignores are, as a rule, the elements the other emphasizes, though English empirical and physico-scientific thought is beginning to tell at the close of this century in Germany, very much as English rationalistic thought told at the beginning of last.