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 Airpower
Myths and Facts

PHILLIP S. MEILINGER
Colonel, USAF, Retired

Air University Press

Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama

December 2003
 Air University Library Cataloging Data

Meilinger, Phillip S., 1948–

Airpower : myths and facts / Phillip S. Meilinger.
p. ; cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-58566-124-4
1. Air power. 2. United States. Army Air Forces.
3. United States. Air Force — History. 4. Bombing,
Aerial. 5. Precision bombing — Effectiveness. I.
Title.
358.4/009/04––dc22

Disclaimer

Opinions, conclusions, and recommendations expressed

or implied within are solely those of the author and do not
necessarily represent the views of Air University, the United
States Air Force, the Department of Defense, or any other
US government agency. Cleared for public release: distri-
bution unlimited.

Air University Press

131 West Shumacher Avenue
Maxwell AFB AL 36112–6615
http://aupress.maxwell.af.mil

ii
 Contents

Myth Page

DISCLAIMER . . . . . . . . . . . . ii
ABOUT THE AUTHOR . . . . . . ix
PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii
1 Between the world wars,
even though the US Army
Air Corps received more
than its fair share of funds
from the Army, it
continued to complain,
agitate, and ask for more. . . . . 1
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
2 Entering World War II,
the Air Corps’s un-
balanced doctrine and
force structure leaned
too heavily towards
strategic bombing. Thus,
air support of ground
forces was inadequate and
largely ignored by airmen. . . . . 17
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

iii
Myth Page

3 The Air Corps entered

World War II with a
“Douhetian” concept of
air war that emphasized
area bombing and the
waging of war on women
and children. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
4 Airmen thought they
could win the war alone. . . . . . 31
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
5 The fact that German
production, especially of
aircraft, continued to
increase throughout 1944
proves that the Combined
Bomber Offensive (CBO)
was ineffective and that
the resources devoted to
it would have been better
spent elsewhere. . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
6 Bombing was ineffective
because it actually

iv
Myth Page

stiffened rather than

lowered enemy morale. . . . . . . 47
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50
7 The atomic bombs were
unnecessary because Japan
was about to surrender;
even if it had not given up,
an invasion or continued
blockade would have
been more humane. . . . . . . . . . 53
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
8 Overall, strategic bombing was
a wasted effort that pro-
duced only minor effects. . . . . 63
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
9 Airpower was a failure in
Vietnam, losing the war
and letting the Army
down. Why even have an
Air Force if it can’t beat a
fourth-rate power like
North Vietnam?. . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

v
Myth Page

10 Strategic bombing failed in

Vietnam because Rolling
Thunder did not break the
will of Ho Chi Minh and
his cohorts to continue the
war in the south. . . . . . . . . . 85
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
11 Airpower was an indiscrimi-
nate weapon that killed
excessive numbers of
Vietnamese civilians. . . . . . . 93
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
12 Too focused on strategic
attack during the Persian
Gulf War, the Air Force
provided inadequate support
to ground forces. . . . . . . . . . . 99
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
13 Air attack is nothing more
than “recreational
bombing”; pilots fly so
high they can’t
possibly hit their
targets accurately. . . . . . . . . 109
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113

vi
Myth Page

14 Despite all the talk by airmen,

the employment of airpower
remains an indiscriminate
use of military force that
deliberately targets
civilians. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121
INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125

Illustrations
Figure

1 US Bomb Tonnage Dropped

on Germany by Month . . . . . 33
2 Targets Struck by Category
(Number and Percentage) in
Operation Iraqi Freedom . . . . 104
3 US Airpower versus the
World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106

Tables

1 Army and Air-Component

Budgets, 1922–41 . . . . . . . . 3

vii
Table Page

2 Army and Navy Air

Budgets, 1922–41 . . . . . . . . 4
3 Army Officer Manning
between the World Wars,
Total and by Branch . . . . . . 9
4 Key US Leaders during
the Vietnam War . . . . . . . . . 76
5 USAF Combat Sorties in
South Vietnam . . . . . . . . . . 78
6 Persian Gulf War: Sorties
Flown by US Service/Total,
by Mission Type . . . . . . . . . 100

viii
 About
the Author

A 1970 graduate of the United States

Air Force Academy, Col Phillip S.
Meilinger, USAF, retired, received an MA
from the University of Colorado and a
PhD from the University of Michigan.
After a tour at the Academy, Colonel
Meilinger was assigned to the Air Staff’s
doctrine division in the Pentagon, where
he wrote and edited numerous Air Force
and joint-doctrine publications, worked
roles-and-missions issues, and partici-
pated in the planning cell for Instant
Thunder during the Gulf War of 1991. A
command pilot who flew C-130s and HC-
130s in both Europe and the Pacific, he
has also worked as an operations officer
in the Pacific Airlift Control Center at

ix
Clark Air Base, Philippines. From 1992 to
1996, Colonel Meilinger served as dean of
the School of Advanced Airpower Studies
(SAAS) (now the School of Advanced Air
and Space Studies [SAASS]), the Air
Force’s only graduate school for airpower
strategists. After leaving SAAS, he served
as a professor of strategy at the Naval War
College.
His publications include Hoyt S. Van-
denberg: The Life of a General (1989;
reprint, Air Force History and Museums
Program, 2000); 10 Propositions Regard-
ing Air Power (Washington, D.C.: Air
Force History and Museums Program,
1995); Airmen and Air Theory: A Review
of the Sources (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air
University Press, 2001); and several dozen
articles and reviews on airpower history
and theory in journals such as Foreign
Policy, Armed Forces and Society, Armed
Forces Journal International, Comparative
Strategy, Journal of Military History, and
Aerospace Power Journal. He also edited
and contributed to The Paths of Heaven:
The Evolution of Airpower Theory (Maxwell
AFB, Ala.: Air University Press, 1997).

x
 After he retired, Colonel Meilinger
became the deputy director of the AERO-
SPACENTER for Science Applications
International Corporation in McLean,
Virginia, where he may be reached by
E-mail at [email protected].

xi
THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK
 Preface

Airpower, especially strategic bombing,

frequently generates controversy. Ever
since the US Army bought its first “aero-
plane” in 1909, debates have raged over
the utility, effectiveness, efficiency, legal-
ity, and even the morality of airpower.
These debates continue despite (or per-
haps because of) the hundreds of books
that have been written on the subject and
the scores of examples witnessed. As the
saying goes, certain topics tend to pro-
duce more heat than they do light. In
some cases, the questions regarding air-
power, strategic bombing, and their
roles in war remain unanswerable—or at
least people fail to agree on the answers.
Soldiers, sailors, and airmen approach
war from different viewpoints and with
differing service-cultural perspectives,
which similarly influence others who
write and speak about war. This is natu-
ral and perhaps advantageous—fresh
ideas are always useful. Unfortunately,

xiii
much of the debate regarding airpower
and strategic bombing has been colored
by accusations, misconceptions, inac-
curacies, myths, and simple untruths.
If airpower needs criticizing—and cer-
tainly there are times when criticism is
appropriate—it must be based on accu-
rate information.
The concept for this essay occurred to
me as a result of questions asked or
statements made to me over the years by
students and faculty at the Naval War
College, Army War College, Air University,
and Britain’s Joint Services Staff College.
In addition, many scholars and military
officers, both active duty and retired,
have raised such issues in print, both
here and abroad; so I decided to explore
them in more depth. What follows are
points and counterpoints that attempt
to clear away some of the detritus that
obscures the subject, thus allowing more
informed debate on the real issues con-
cerning airpower and strategic bomb-
ing. This in turn, hopefully, will give our
political and military leaders a better

xiv
Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Comparative Religion
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States
and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no
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Title: Comparative Religion

Author: J. Estlin Carpenter

Release date: October 13, 2013 [eBook #43947]

Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Al Haines

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COMPARATIVE

RELIGION ***
 COMPARATIVE
RELIGION

BY

J. ESTLIN CARPENTER

D.LITT.

PRINCIPAL OF MANCHESTER COLLEGE, OXFORD

NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

LONDON
WILLIAMS AND NORGATE

CONTENTS
CHAP.

I INTRODUCTORY
II THE PANORAMA OF RELIGIONS
III RELIGION IN THE LOWER CULTURE
IV SPIRITS AND GODS
V SACRED ACTS
VI SACRED PRODUCTS
VII RELIGION AND MORALITY
VIII PROBLEMS OF LIFE AND DESTINY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

"Those first affections,

Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence."
WORDSWORTH.

"To the philosopher the existence of God may seem to rest

on a syllogism; in the eyes of the historian it rests on the
whole evolution of human thought."—MAX MÜLLER.
 COMPARATIVE RELIGION

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

Over the chancel-arch of the church at South Leigh, a few miles west of
Oxford, is a fresco of the Last Judgment and the Resurrection, of the type
well known in mediæval art. On the adjoining south wall stands the stately
figure of the archangel Michael. In his right hand he holds a pair of scales.
In one scale is the figure of a soul in the attitude of prayer; beside it is Our
Lady carrying a rosary. The other contains an ox-headed demon blowing a
horn. This scale rises steadily, though another demon has climbed to the
beam above to weigh it down, and a third from hell's mouth below
endeavours to drag it towards the abyss. The same theme recurs in several
other English churches; and it is carved over the portals of many French
cathedrals, as at Notre Dame in Paris.

Unroll a papyrus from an Egyptian tomb of the Eighteenth Dynasty

before the days of Moses, and you will see a somewhat similar scene. The
just and merciful judge Osiris, "lord of life and king of eternity," sits in the
Hall of the two goddesses of Truth. Hither the soul is brought for the ordeal
which will determine his future bliss or woe. Before forty-two assessors he
declares his innocence of various offences: "I am not a doer of what is
wrong; I am not a robber; I am not a slayer of men; I am not a niggard; I am
not a teller of lies; I am not a monopoliser of food; I am no extortioner; I am
not unchaste; I am not the causer of others' tears...." Then he is led,
sometimes supported by the two goddesses of Truth, to the actual trial.
Resting on an upright post is the beam of a balance. It is guarded by a dog-
headed ape, symbol of Thoth, "lord of the scales." Thoth has various
functions in the ancient texts, and even rises into a kind of impersonation of
the principle of intelligence in the whole universe. Here as the computer of
time and the inventor of numbers he plays the part of secretary to Osiris. In
one scale is placed the heart of the deceased, the organ of conscience. In the
other is sometimes a square weight, sometimes an ostrich plume, symbol of
truth or righteousness. Thoth stands beside the scales, tablet in hand, to
record the issue as the soul passes to the great award.

The scenes and the persons differ; but the fundamental conception of
judgment is the same, and it is carried out by the same method. Is this an
accidental coincidence of metaphor? The figure of the balance was naturally
suggestive for the estimate of worth, and the Psalmist cried in bitterness of
heart—

Surely men of low degree are vanity,

And men of high degree are a lie,
In the balances they will go up;
They are altogether lighter than vanity.

The mysterious hand wrote upon the wall of Belshazzar's palace the
strange word Tekel, which contained the dreadful sentence, "Thou art
weighed in the balances and art found wanting." To early Indian
imagination, before the days of the Buddha (500 B.C.), the ordeal of the
balance was part of the outlook into the world beyond. In the ancient
Persian teaching, Rashnu, the angel of justice, before the shining "Friend,"
the mediator Mithra, presided over the weighing of the spirits at the bridge
of destiny, over which they would pass to heaven or hell.

Is Michael the heir of Thoth or Rashnu? He passed into the Christian

Church from the Jewish Synagogue, where he was specially connected with
the destinies of the dead. He guided the souls of the just to the heavenly
world, where he led them into the mystic city, the counterpart of Jerusalem
below; or he stood at the gate as the angel of righteousness to decide who
should be admitted. So for the Greeks Hermes was the guardian of the
spirits of the departed, whom he conducted to the judgment in the under-
world. In this respect, then, Hermes and Michael were akin. But Hermes
also played many other parts, and the Greeks identified him with the
Egyptian Thoth. When the destinies of Hector and Achilles were weighed
against each other, ere the last mortal combat, the vase-painter could
represent Hermes as holding the balance in the presence of Zeus, much as
Thoth had presided over it before Osiris. The Etruscan artists depicted
Mercury, the Italian equivalent of Hermes, fulfilling the same function.
True, the purport of the test was different. But the symbol was the same;
and when Hermes gave place to Michael, as Christianity was carried to the
West, the scales passed from the Hellenic to the Jewish Christian figure,
though they had in the one case been used to decide the allotment of fate,
and in the other were employed for judgment. Why they remained so long
unused in Christian symbolism is obscure. The revival of intercourse with
the East through the Crusades may have given new force to the idea as part
of the great judgment-process; and the figure to which it was most natural
to assign it was that of Thoth-Hermes-Michael.

The religion of the ancient Hindus was founded, as every one knows,
upon the venerable hymns collected into one sacred book under the name of
the Rig Veda. These hymns, 1017 in number, containing over 10,000 verses,
are now arranged in ten books, twice the number of the divisions of the
Hebrew Psalter. Like most of the Psalms they are traditionally ascribed to
different poets, in whose families they were sung; and their authors were
regarded as Rishis, bards, or sages. Of their real origin nothing is definitely
known; their composition probably extends over many generations, perhaps
over several centuries; and dim suggestions of their super-earthly origin
already appear in some of the latest poems. They became the peculiar
treasure of the priestly order; the most laborious efforts were devised for the
study and preservation of the sacred text; the methods of pronunciation, the
rules of grammar, the principles of metre, the derivations of words, were all
elaborated with the utmost minuteness into different branches of Vedic lore.
Two other smaller Vedas, collections of sacrificial formulæ and hymns,
were very early placed beside the main work, and a fourth collection gained
similar rank much later. With the development of the great schools of Hindu
philosophy, especially after the decline of Buddhism, the whole question of
authority as the foundation of belief and reasoning was forced to the front,
and this in due time was applied to the Veda. Brahmanical speculation had
been long concerned with its divine origin. It sprang from one of the
mysterious figures in which the ancient theologians expressed their sense of
the real unity of the heavenly powers, Prajāpati, the "lord of creatures,"
through the medium of Vach, or sacred Speech. As such it was "the firstborn
in the universe." But as proceeding from Prajāpati it issued from the world
of the an-anta, the "un-ending" or "infinite," which was likewise the sphere
of the a-mrita, the "im-mortal" or "deathless." So it belonged to the realm
of the eternal, where it could be beheld, not indeed with the eye of sense,
but with the higher discernment of the holy Seer. The philosophical schools
occupied themselves accordingly with the defence of the eternity and
consequent infallibility of the Veda. Elaborate arguments were devised to
explain the relation of words to things, and of sound in the abstract to
uttered speech or again to show how behind individuals which had their
origin in time there existed species (even of the gods) which belonged to the
timeless order transcending our experience. So the conclusion was reached,
in the words of the great philosopher Çankara (A.D. 788-820), that "the
authority of the Veda with regard to the matters stated by it is independent
and direct; just as the light of the sun is the direct means of our knowledge
of form and colour."

Just at this era, by a singular coincidence, a remarkable controversy was

raging in the schools of Mohammedan theology. Mohammed died in A.D.
632. He had himself recorded nothing; the traditions about him are not even
agreed whether he could read or write. His oracles were taught to his
disciples, who began to note down some of them during the prophet's life;
soon after his death the formal collection of them was undertaken; and
under Caliph Othman (651) four copies were deposited in the cities of
Mecca, Cufa, Basra, and Damascus. We know the work under the name of
the Koran (Qurān = reading), one of the numerous expressions which
Mohammed was said to have coined for the revelation imparted to him
from on high. Later generations attached the title exclusively to the
utterances fixed in literary form, and discerned in them a unity designed by
the prophet; but it seems more consonant with his view to regard each of
the 114 discourses (suras) as a unit in itself, and the whole as only a
fragment of his teaching. Many passages raise a claim to specific divine
origin; others allude to the uncreated Scripture, umm-al-kitab, "the mother
of the book."

On such hints was founded the remarkable doctrine that the Koran was
eternal in its essence as the word of God, a necessary attribute of the Most
High. First formulated in the middle of the eighth century (A.D. 747-748),
it roused extraordinary interest outside the theological schools. It was
fostered by the early Caliphs, for it supported their political authority, and
the emphasis which it placed on the doctrine of predestination supplied
them with a potent weapon. Opposition arose on the ground of free will; the
passages enforcing the principle of predestination were evaded by the
handy method of allegorical interpretation, and the revolt of the moral
consciousness led, as it has done elsewhere, to rationalism. Public debates
were held amid general excitement, when the Caliph Ma'mun (813-833)
unexpectedly espoused the rationalist cause, and issued a decree forbidding
the discussion. The popular forces, however, were in the long run
triumphant. In 847 a new Caliph came into power, inclined for political
reasons to the higher doctrine. Lectures were instituted in the mosques on
the attributes of God, and vast audiences—the historians report twenty and
even thirty thousand hearers—listened eagerly while the theologians
disputed whether God's word could be conceived distinct from his absolute
being. Faith in the prophet triumphed; the exaltation of the product reacted
on that of the person; and the Arabian shepherd could be regarded as the
inerrant, sinless, uncreated light, sent forth from Deity himself, who for his
sake spread out the earth and arched the heavens, and proclaimed the great
confession "There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet."

Every great historical religion passes through numerous phases, as it is

brought into contact with different cultures, and evokes various forms of
speculative thought and inward experience. Buddhism has been no
exception to this rule. It sprang up in a moral revolt against the claims of
the Brahmanical teachers, and in the midst of the discussions of the sophists
turned its back on metaphysics and sought to concentrate attention on the
Noble Path of the good life. It offered a way of deliverance from the weary
round of births and deaths by the victory over ignorance and sin, and sought
to overcome selfishness by eliminating the idea that man has, or is, a Self.
Accordingly it presented its founder Gotama (500 B.C.), as the man who
had attained the Truth, who had by a long series of lives devoted to the
higher righteousness acquired the insight into the causes and meaning of
existence, and imparted it to his followers with instructions to carry it forth
for the welfare of their fellow-men. For this end he founded a union or
order; he instituted a discipline, and committed his teaching to a body of
disciples whose successors gradually bore it into distant lands. He himself
passed away, leaving no trace behind. His memory was cherished with
dutiful devotion. Pilgrimages to the scenes of his birth and Buddhahood,
commemorative festivals and pious rites, kept the image of the Teacher
before the mind of the believer. But no prayer was offered to him; no
worship created any bond of fellowship between the departed Gotama and
the community which he had left on earth.

But in the course of several generations remarkable changes took place.

Environed by philosophical speculations, Buddhism could not remain
wholly unaffected by the great ideas of metaphysics. While one branch,
now surviving in Ceylon, Burma and Siam, remained faithful to the
Founder's exclusion of all such conceptions as being, substance, and the
like, others began to interpret the person of the Buddha in terms of the
Absolute, and identified him with the Eternal and the Self-Existent, who
from time to time for the welfare of the world took on himself the
semblance of humanity, and appeared to be born, to attain Enlightenment,
and die. The great aim of the deliverance of all sentient beings from error,
suffering, and guilt, expressed itself further in the association with him of
numerous other holy forms sharing the same purpose of the world's
salvation.

Among these was the Buddha Amitâbha, the Buddha of Boundless

Light,[1] who had made a wondrous vow in virtue of which a blessed future
of righteousness and joy in the Western Paradise was secured for all who
put their trust in him. Carried into China, this devotion acquired great
popularity, and centuries later it passed into Japan. There, while Europe was
sending its warriors to win back from the Crescent the city of the Cross,
while Bernard and Francis and Dominic were awakening new enthusiasm
for the monastic life, two famous teachers, Honen (1133-1212) and Shin-
ran (1173-1262), developed the doctrine of "salvation by faith." Honen was
the only son of a military chief who died of a wound inflicted by an enemy.
On his deathbed he enjoined the boy never to seek revenge, and bade him
become a monk for the spiritual enlightenment both of his father and his
father's foe. So the lad passed in due time into one of the great Buddhist
monasteries on mount Hiei. Long years of laborious study followed, till in
1175 he reached the conviction that faith in Amida[2] was the true way of
salvation. A deep sense of human sinfulness and the belief in an All-
Merciful Deliverer were the essential elements of his religion. Three
emperors became his pupils, and his life, compiled by imperial order after
his death, resembles that of a mediæval Christian saint. Visions of Amida
and of the holy teachers of the past were vouchsafed to him. He preached—
like another St. Francis—to the serpents and the birds. His person was
mysteriously transfigured, and a wondrous light filled his dwelling.

[1] Also called Amitâyus, the Buddha of Boundless Life.

[2] The Japanese form of the Sanskrit Amitâbha.

His disciple Shin-ran carried the doctrine of his master yet a little farther.
Filled with adoring gratitude to the Buddha of Boundless Light, who, as the
deliverer, was also the Buddha of Boundless Life, he argued that infinite
mercy and infinite wisdom must belong to him; and these in their turn
implied the power to give effect to his great purpose. He passed from
village to village through the Eastern provinces, rousing enthusiasm by the
hymns into which he wrought his new faith. They are still sung in the
temples at the present day. But whereas Honen had recognised a value in
good works, and had enjoined the duty of constant repetition of the sacred
name of Amida, Shin-ran insisted that all element of "self-exertion" must be
purged away, and faith in the merits of Amida—"the exertion of another"—
should alone remain. Some of the conceptions of Western teaching thus
present themselves in Japan in the midst of modes of life and thought of
purely Indian origin. Christian theologians had debated whether faith was to
be regarded as an opus or a donum, a "work" or a "gift," was it something to
be attained by man or was it bestowed by God? The Japanese answer was
unhesitating. Faith was not earned by effort, or achieved by merit, it was
granted out of immeasurable love. "The Buddha," we read, "confers this
heart. The heart which takes refuge in his heart is not produced by oneself.
It is produced by the command of Buddha. Hence it is called the believing
heart by the Power of Another." The natural corollary was that in due course
this grace would be bestowed on all. The Buddha of Boundless Light and
Life would overcome the darkness of ignorance and death; and this type of
Buddhism, now the most active and influential in Japan, preaches the
doctrine of universal salvation. The student finds here a whole series of
parallels to the Evangelical interpretation of Christianity. Both schemes are
founded on the same essential ideas, man's need of a deliverer, and the
attainment of salvation by no human conduct but by faith in a divine
person.

The foregoing sketches raise many problems. What are the actual
features in different religions which are susceptible of comparison? How
can we distinguish between resemblances which are deep-seated and spring
from the fundamental principles of two given faiths, and those which are
only on the surface, and probably accidental? How far can such parallels be
ascribed to suggestion through historical contact, and, if they lie too far
apart for possibilities of any form of mutual dependence, out of what
common types of experience are they derived, what forces of thought have
shaped them, what feelings do they express?

The student of Comparative Religion seeks answers to these and similar

questions. A vast field of inquiry is at once opened before him. It embraces
practically every continent, people, and tribe on the face of the globe. It
begins in the last period of the great ice age, when men lived in this country
in the company of the elephant, the rhinoceros, and the mammoth, and
hunted their game through Germany, Belgium, and France. In dim recesses
of the caves they painted the deer, the bison, the antelope and the wild boar,
under conditions which imply some kind of mysterious or holy place. They
buried their dead with care, and though we can ask them no questions we
may infer with much probability that they celebrated some kind of funeral
meal, and deposited implements and ornaments in the grave for the use of
the departed in the world beyond. In one case hundreds of shells were found
buried with the skull of a little child. Similar usages may be traced through
the slow advances of culture to the present day. Death is an element of
universal experience; and it is not unreasonable to suppose that if the
negroid peoples of Western Europe had worked out some view of its
meaning and consequences, there were other things to be done or avoided
out of fear or reverence for the Unseen.

The first objects of comparison are thus found in the outward acts which
fall more or less clearly within the sphere of religion, the places where these
are performed, the persons who do them, the means required for them, the
occasions to which they are attached. These all belong to the external
world; they can be observed and recorded, even though we may not be sure
what they mean. When they are brought together, a series of gradations of
complexity can be established, while a common purpose may be traced
through all. From the negro who lays his offering of grain or fruit at the foot
of a tree with the simple utterance, "Thank you, gods," to a great
Eucharistic celebration at St. Peter's, a continuous line of ritual may be
followed, in which the action becomes more elaborate, the functions and
character of the officiating ministers more strictly defined, the accessories
of worship more complicated. This corresponds to the enrichment and
elevation of the ideas and emotions that animate the act, as that which is at
first performed as part of tribal usage and ancestral custom acquires the
force of divine institution and personal duty.

Behind the external act lies the internal world of thought and feeling.
The social sanction may invest the ceremony itself with so much force that
the worshipper's interest may lie rather in the due performance of the rite
than in the deity to whom it is addressed. The element of belief may be
relatively vague and indefinite. But in the more highly organised religions
belief also may externalise itself through hymn and prayer, through myth
and history and prophecy. When a religion is strong enough to create a
literature, a fresh object of comparison is presented. The utterances of poet
and sage, of lawgiver and seer, can be set side by side. Their conceptions of
the Powers towards which worship is directed can be studied; the characters
and functions of the several deities can be determined. This is the
intellectual element in religion. It has often been regarded as the element of
most importance, because it seemed most readily to admit of the test of
truth. It finds its most formal expression in the articles of a creed, and has
sometimes been erected into the chief ground of the supreme arbitrament of
heaven and hell.

There remains the element of feeling. This also may be so entangled in

tradition, so enveloped in the pressure of surrounding influences, that it is at
first obscure and indistinct. But its importance was early recognised when
the origin of religion was ascribed to fear, in the oft-quoted line of the
Roman Satirist Petronius Arbiter at the court of Nero (who committed
suicide A.D. 66)—

"Primus in orbe deos fecit timor.

In the eighteenth century the genius of Lessing (1729-1781) fastened on

the feeling of the heart as the essential foundation of religion. No written
record, no historical event, could guarantee its truth; that lay in the
constitution of the human spirit in its interpretation of its experience. In his
famous drama of "Nathan the Sage" he applied this to the representatives of
three great historical religions which were thus brought together for
comparison: the Christian Templar, the Mohammedan Saladin, and the Jew
Nathan. Herder (1744-1803) endeavoured with the materials then at
command to trace the origin and development of religion, starting from the
primitive impressions made upon the mind by the world without, and
sought to interpret mythology as the imaginative utterance of man's
consciousness of the power, light, and life in Nature. In the next generation
Schleiermacher (1767-1834) placed the essence of religion in the feeling of
absolute dependence, without attempting to define the object towards which
it was directed. The study of origins has passed out of the hands of the
philosophers and the theologians. But it cannot dispense with psychology;
and among the factors of early religious life will be found the beginnings of
wonder, reverence and awe. And this element, often cruelly twisted into
false and degraded forms, and sometimes refined in the higher types of
mysticism into the loftiest spirituality, inheres in all practice and belief.
 What, then, is the basis of comparison among different faiths? The
student who is engaged in tracing the life-history of any one religion will
naturally start from the field of investigation thus selected. As he widens his
outlook he will find that a number of illustrative instances force themselves
upon his view. The people whose institutions and ideas he is examining are
members of a given ethnic group. The ancient Hebrews, for instance,
belong on the one side to the life of the desert, and are kin with the nomad
Arabs, on the other they are related to the authors of Babylonian culture. Or
in the course of events a new religion is brought by missionary impulse into
a less-developed civilisation, as when Buddhism passed from China
through Corea into Japan, and was planted in the midst of a cruder faith.
Widely different modes of thought are thus brought into close juxtaposition,
their relation and interaction can be examined, and the inner forces of each
compared.

That such inquiries must be conducted without prejudice need not now
be enforced. An eighteenth-century writer might lay it down that "the first
general division of Religion is into True and False," and might draw the
conclusion that "the chapter of False Religions is by much the longest in the
History of the religious opinions and practices of mankind."[3] Dr. Johnson
could sententiously declare that "there are two objects of curiosity, the
Christian world and the Mohammedan world—all the rest may be
considered as barbarous." A learned Oxford scholar of the last generation
could speak of the "three chief false religions," Brahmanism, Buddhism,
and Mohammedanism. Missionaries and travellers of an elder day, who
took some form of Christianity as their foundation, sometimes found the
savages among whom they laboured destitute of religion because they had
no Father in heaven and no everlasting hell. These attitudes, it is now freely
recognised, are not scientific. For purposes of comparison no single religion
can be selected as a standard for the whole human race. Particular products
may be set side by side. The asceticism of India may be compared with that
of early Christianity. The ritual of sacrifice may be studied in the book of
Leviticus or the Hindu Brāhmanas. What are sometimes called "Ethnic
Trinities" may be examined in the light of Alexandrian theology. The suras
of the Koran may be read after the prophecies of Isaiah. The various phases
of the Buddhist Order, with its missionary zeal, its power of adaptability to
different cultures, its readiness to accept new teaching, may be contrasted
with the wonderful cohesiveness and expansion of the Roman Catholic
Church. The ideas of the Hellenic mystery-religions may be found to throw
light on the language of St. Paul. Out of the multitudinous phases of human
experience all the world over innumerable resemblances will be discovered.
Each is a fact for the student, and must be treated on equal terms in the field
of science. But they will have more or less intrinsic significance in the scale
of values. Philosophy may attempt to range them in gradations of worth, in
nobility of form, in dignity of expression, in moral purity, in social
effectiveness. Beneath infinite diversity the mystic will affirm the unity of
the whole, with the poet of the Masnavi, Jalálu-'d-Dïn of Balkh (A.D. 1207-
1273)—

"Because He that is praised is, in fact, only One,

In this respect all religions are only one religion."

[3] Broughton, Dictionary of all Religions, 1745.

The materials of comparison are, of course, of the most varied kind. The
interest of the ancient Greeks was early roused in the diverse practices
which they saw around them, and the observations of Herodotus concerning
the Egyptians, the Persians, the Scythians, and many another tribe upon the
fringe of barbarism, have earned for him the modern title of the "Father of
Anthropology." Travellers, missionaries, government officers, men of trade
and men of learning, have recorded the usages of the lower culture all over
the world, naturally with varying accuracy and penetration, and a vast range
of facts has been registered through successive stages of complexity in
social and religious development. Many of these have their parallel in the
folklore of countries where the uniformity of modern civilisation has not
crushed out all traditional beliefs, while annual customs or even village
games may contain survivals of what were once important ceremonial rites.
The irruption of the Arab conquerors into Europe brought Christianity face
to face with Mohammedanism and its sacred book. In the seventeenth
century the Jesuit Fathers in China first made known the teachings of Kong-
fu-tse ("Philosopher Kong") 500 B.C. whose name they Latinised into
Confucius. Towards the end of the eighteenth century a brilliant little band
of English scholars in Calcutta began to reveal the astounding copiousness
of the sacred literature of India. During the expedition of Napoleon to Egypt
in 1799 the Rosetta Stone (now in the British Museum) yielded the clue to
the hieroglyphics which cover the walls of temple and tomb. A generation
later a young British officer, Lieutenant Henry Rawlinson, began in 1835 to
copy a triple inscription on a cliff of Mount Behistun, near Kermanshah in
Persia. The work was dangerous and difficult, but he was enabled to
complete it ten years later. It contained an identical record in three
languages, Persian, Median, and Babylonio-Assyrian, and provided the
means for deciphering the cuneiform script of the tablets and cylinders soon
recovered from the mounds of Mesopotamia.

Meanwhile the lovers of the past were at work in many other directions.
The Swedish Lonrott collected the ancient songs of the Finnic people, under
the name of the Kalevala. Other scholars brought to light the treasures of
Scandinavian mythology in the Icelandic Edda with its two collections of
poetry and prose. In Wales and Ireland the texts which enshrined the Celtic
faith awoke new interest. The students of classical antiquity began to collect
inscriptions, and it was soon realised that the spade might be no less useful
in Greece or Asia Minor than beside the Nile or the Euphrates.

The last century has thus accumulated an immense mass of material in

literature and art. There are codes of law regulating in the name of deity the
practice of family and social life. There are hymns of praise or of penitence,
sometimes in strange association with the spells of magic. There are books
of ritual and sacrifice, of ceremonial order, of philosophical speculation and
moral precept. There are rules of discipline for religious communities; and
there are pictures of judgment and delineations of the heavenly life.
Sculpture and painting have been employed to give external form to the
objects of pious reverence; and the architecture of the sanctuary has
wrought into stone the fundamental conceptions of majesty, proportion, and
grace.

All this, it is plain, rests upon history. When Confucius visited the seat of
the imperial dynasty at the court of Chow, he studied with deep interest the
arrangements for the great sacrifices to Heaven and Earth; he surveyed the
ancestral temples in which the emperor offered his worship; he inspected
the Hall of Light whose walls bore paintings of the sovereigns from the
remotest times; and then he turned to his disciples with the remark: "As we
use a glass to examine the forms of things, so must we study the past to
understand the present." Comparison that confines itself solely to counting
up resemblances here and there will be of small value. We cannot
comprehend the real meaning of a single religious rite, a single sentence of
any scripture, apart from the context to which it belongs. Acts and words
alike issue out of experiences that may be hundreds of years old, and sum
up generations, it may be whole ages, of a continuous process. To trace the
successive forms of these changes, to describe the steps through which they
have passed, is like making a chart of a voyage, and laying down the lines
of continent and ocean, island and cape. Or just as the races of man are
sorted, and their characteristics are enumerated without reference to the
various causes which have produced their modifications, so geography and
ethnography might companion hierography, the delineation of "the Sacred"
in its concrete manifestations.

But behind the external evolution of a given religion, its modes of

worship, its ministers, its doctrines, lie more complicated questions. What
causes shaped these acts and moulded these beliefs? What elements of race
are to be discerned in them? How can we account for the diversities
between the religions of peoples belonging to a common stock, like those of
India and those of ancient Italy? What have been the effects of climate, of
the struggle with alien peoples and new environment? How does the food-
supply influence the formation of religious ideas? What contacts have been
felt with other races, and what positive loans or more impalpable influences
have passed from one side to the other? We, find here in hierology, the
science of "the Sacred," an analogue to the reasoning which accounts for
the distribution of land and water, the rise of mountain ranges and the
sculpture of valleys and river-beds out of the stratification of the earth's
crust, and builds up a science of geology; or which traces the results of
migration upon peoples, the consequences of inter-marriage with other
tribes, the disastrous issues of war, surveys the immense variety of causes
which have contributed to new developments of racial energy, and arranges
this knowledge in the science of ethnology.
 And, lastly, the values of these facts must be estimated. How far can they
be accepted as expressing the reality of the Unseen Power, and man's
relation to it? Hierology may explain how men have developed certain
practices or framed certain beliefs; to determine their reasonableness is the
task of the philosophy of religion or hierosophy.[4]

[4] These three terms have been suggested by Count Goblet d'Alviella,
of Brussels.

The study of "Comparative Religion" assumes that religion is already in

existence. It deals with actual usages, which it places side by side to see
what light they can throw upon each other. It leaves the task of formulating
definitions to philosophy. It is not concerned with origins, and does not
project itself into the prehistoric past where conjecture takes the place of
evidence. An old miracle-play directed Adam to pass across the stage
"going to be created." Whether religion first appeared in the cultus of the
dead, or only entered the field after the collapse of a reign of magic which
had ceased to satisfy man's demands for help, or was born of dread and
desired to keep its gods at a distance, only remotely affects the process of
discovering and examining the resemblances of its forms, and interpreting
the forces without and within which have produced them. The sphere of
speculation has its own attractions, but in this little book an attempt will be
made to keep to facts.

Three hundred years ago Edward Herbert,[5] an Oxford scholar who

played many parts and played them well, in deep revolt against the
ecclesiastical doctrine that all the world outside the pale of the Church was
doomed to eternal damnation, devoted himself to the study of comparative
religion. With the materials which the classics afforded him, he examined
the recorded facts among the Greeks and Romans, the Carthaginians and
Arabs, the Phrygians, the Persians, the Assyrians. The whole fabric of
human experience was built up, he argued, on certain common knowledges
or notions, which could be distinguished by specific marks, such as priority,
independence, universality, certainty, necessity for man's well-being, and
immediacy. Here were the bases of law in relation to social order, and of
religion in relation to the Powers above man. These principles in religion
were five: (1) that there is one supreme God; (2) that he ought to be
worshipped; (3) that virtue and piety are the chief parts of divine worship;
(4) that we ought to be sorry for our sins and repent of them; (5) that divine
goodness doth dispense rewards and punishments both in this life and after
it. These truths had been implanted by the Creator in the mind of man, and
their subsequent corruption produced the idolatries of antiquity.

[5] 1583-1648., elder brother of "Holy George Herbert."

The theory held its ground in various forms till its last echoes appeared
in highly theologic guise in the writings of Mr. Gladstone. He pleaded that
there must have been a true religion in the world before an untrue one
began to gather and incrust upon it, and this religion included three great
doctrines—the existence of the Triune Deity, the advent of a Redeemer, and
the power of the Evil One and the defeat of the rebel angels. These had
formed part of a primeval revelation. In the Homeric theology he traced the
first in the three sons of Kronos—Zeus, Hades, and Poseidon. The second
he found in Apollo, whose mother Leto represented the Woman from whom
the Redeemer should descend. The rebel angels were equated with the
Titans; the power of temptation was personified in Ate; the rainbow of the
covenant was identified with Iris. The student of to-day can hardly believe
that this volume could have been published in the same year in which
Darwin and Wallace formulated the new scientific principle of "natural
selection" as the great agent in the formation of species, and thus laid the
foundation of the modern conception of evolution (1858).

It is on this great idea that the whole study of the history of religion is
now firmly established. At the foundation of all endeavours to classify the
multitudinous facts which it embraces, lies the conviction that whatever
may be the occasional instances of degeneration or decline, the general
movement of human things advances from the cruder and less complex to
the more refined and developed. In the range of knowledge, in the sphere of
the arts, in the command over nature, in the stability and expansion of the
social order, there are everywhere signs of growth, even if isolated groups,
such as the Australians, the Todas of India, or the Veddas of Ceylon, seem
to be in the last stages of stagnation or decay. Religion is one phase of
human culture, it expresses man's attitude to the powers around him and the
events of life. Its various forms repose upon the unity of the race. The
anthropologist is convinced that if a new tribe is discovered in some forest
in central Africa, whether its stature be large or small, its persons will
contain the same limbs as other men, and will live by the same physical
processes. The sociologist expects that their social groups will approximate
to other known types of human relations. The philologist anticipates that
behind the obscurities of their speech he will find modes of thought which
he can match elsewhere. The student of religions will in the same way be on
the look-out for customs and usages akin to those which he already knows;
he will assume that under similar conditions experience will be moulded on
similar lines, and the streams of thought and feeling—though small causes
may easily deflect their course—will tend to flow in parallel channels as
they issue from minds of the same order, and traverse corresponding scenes.

And just as the general theory of evolution includes the unity of bodily
structure and mental faculty, so it will vindicate what may be called the
unity of the religious consciousness. The old classifications based on the
idea that religions consisted of a body of doctrines which must be true or
false, reached by natural reflection or imparted by supernatural revelation,
disappear before a wider view. Theologies may be many, but religion is one.
It was after this truth that the Vedic seers were groping when they cried,
"Men call him Indra, Mitra, Varuna, Agni; sages name variously him who is
but one"; or again, "the sages in their hymns give many forms to him who is
but one." When the Roman Empire had brought under one rule the
multitudinous peoples of Western Asia, North Africa, and Southern and
Middle Europe, and new worships were carried hither and thither by priest
and missionary, soldier and merchant and slave, the titles and attributes of
the gods were freely blended and exchanged. Thinkers of different schools
invented various modes of harmonising rival cults. When "Jupiter best and
greatest" was surrounded by a vast crowd of lesser deities, the philosophic
mind discerned a common element running through all their worship.
"There is one Supreme God," wrote Maximus of Madaura to Augustine,
about A.D. 390, "without natural offspring, who is, as it were, the God and
Mighty Father of all. The powers of this Deity, diffused through the
universe which he has made, we worship under many names, as we are all
ignorant of his true name. Thus it happens that while in diverse
supplications we approach separated, as it were, certain parts of the Divine
Being, we are seen in reality to be the worshippers of him in whom all these
parts are one." Here is the prayer of a Blackfoot chief of our generation in
the great ceremonial of the Sun-Dance, reported by Mr. McClintock,[6]
which blends the implications of theology with the impulses and emotions
of religion—

[6] The Old North Trail, 1910, p. 297.

"Great Sun Power! I am praying for my people that they may be happy
in the summer and that they may live through the cold of winter. Many are
sick and in want. Pity them and let them survive. Grant that they may live
long and have abundance. May we go through these ceremonies correctly,
as you taught our forefathers to do in the days that are past. If we make
mistakes, pity us!

"Help us, Mother Earth! for we depend upon your goodness. Let there be
rain to water the prairies, that the grass may grow long and the berries be
abundant.

"O Morning Star! when you look down upon us, give us peace and
refreshing sleep.

"Great Spirit! bless our children, friends, and visitors through a happy
life. May our trails lie straight and level before us. Let us live to be old. We
are all your children, and ask these things with good hearts."
 CHAPTER II

THE PANORAMA OF RELIGIONS

Twice in the history of the world has it been possible to survey a wide
panorama of religions, and twice has the interest of travellers, men of
science, and students of philosophy, been attracted by the immense variety
of worships and beliefs. In the second century of our era the Roman Empire
embraced an extraordinary range of nationalities within its sway. In the
twentieth the whole history of the human race has been thrown open to the
explorer, and an overwhelming mass of materials from every land confronts
him. It may be worth while to take a hasty glance at the chief groups of
facts that are thus disclosed, and make a sort of map of their relations.

The scientific curiosity of the ancient Greeks was early awakened, and
Thales of Miletus (624-546 B.C.), chief of the seven "wise men," and
founder of Greek geometry and philosophy, was believed to have studied
under the priests of Egypt, as well as to have visited Asia and become
acquainted with the Chaldean astronomy. Still more extensive travel was
attributed to his younger contemporary Pythagoras, whose varied learning
was explained in late traditions by his sojourn east and west, among the
Persian Magi, the Indian Brahmans, and the Druids of Gaul. The first great
record of observations is contained in the History of Herodotus of
Halicarnassus on the coast of Asia Minor. Born in 484 B.C., six years after
Marathon, and four years old when the Greeks put Xerxes to flight at
Salamis, he devoted his maturity to the record of the great international
struggle. Hither and thither he passed, collecting information, an eager
student of human things. In Egypt he compared the gods with those of
Greece, and attempted to distinguish two sets of elements in Hellenic
religion, Egyptian and Pelasgic. He left notes on the Babylonians and the
Persians, on the Scythians in the vast tracts east of northern Europe, on the
Getæ south of the Danube.
 When the conquests of Alexander the Great (356-323 B.C.) threw open
the gates of Asia, a stream of travellers passed into Persia and India, whose
reports were utilised by the geographers of later days. The religion of
Zoroaster, whose name was already known to Plato, attracted great
attention. At the court of Chandragupta on the Ganges, at the opening of the
third century B.C., Megasthenes, the ambassador of Seleucus (who had
succeeded to the dominions of Alexander in Asia), set down brief
memoranda on the usages and belief of the Hindus among whom he
resided. Nearer home the representatives of Mesopotamian and Egyptian
learning commended their national cultures to their conquerors. Berosus,
priest of Bel in Babylon, translated into Greek a Babylonian work on
astronomy and astrology, and compiled a history of his country from
ancient documents; while his contemporary, Manetho, of Sebennytus in the
Nile Delta, undertook a similar service for his native land.

Meanwhile the great library and schools at Alexandria had been founded.
Hither came students from many lands; and the Christian fathers Eusebius
and Epiphanius in the fourth century attributed to the librarian of the royal
patron of literature, Ptolemy Philadelphus (285-247 B.C.), the design of
collecting the sacred books of the Ethiopians, Indians, Persians, Elamites,
Babylonians, Assyrians, Romans, Phœnicians, Syrians, and Greeks. The
Jews had settled in Alexandria in considerable numbers; they began to
translate their Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, and little by little they planted
their synagogues all round the Eastern Mediterranean, and finally
established their worship in Rome. The Egyptian deities in their turn went
abroad. The worship of Serapis was introduced at Athens. Isis, the sister-
wife of Osiris and mother of Horus, goddess of many functions—among
others of protecting sailors—was carried round the Levant to Syria, Asia
Minor, Greece, and as far north as the Hellespont and Thrace. Westwards
she was borne to Sicily and South Italy. In due time she entered Rome, and
in spite of senatorial orders five times repeated (in the first century B.C.), to
tear down her altars and statues, she secured her place, and received
homage all through the West from the outskirts of the Sahara to the Roman
wall north of our own Tyne.

The introduction of Greek gods had begun centuries before. As early as

493 B.C., at a time of serious famine, a temple had been built to Demeter,
Dionysus, and Persephonê; many others followed; resemblances among the
native gods quickly led to identifications; and new forms of worship tended
to displace the old. After another crisis (206 B.C.) the "Great Mother,"
Cybelê, the Phrygian goddess of Mount Ida, was imported. The black
aerolite which was supposed to be her abode, was presented by King
Attalus to the ambassadors of the Roman senate. The goddess was solemnly
welcomed at the Port of Ostia, and was ultimately carried by noble Roman
ladies on to the Palatine hill.

The history of later days was full of notes upon religion. Cæsar
interspersed them among the narratives of his campaigns in Gaul; Tacitus
drew on his recollections as an officer in active service for his description
of the Germans. There was as yet no literature in Wales or Ireland to
embody the Celtic traditions; and the Scandinavian Saga was unborn. But
the geographers, like Strabo (first century A.D.), collected a great deal of
material that must have been gathered ultimately from travellers, soldiers,
traders, and slaves. A wise and gentle philosophic Greek, Plutarch of
Chæronea in Bœotia (A.D. 46-120), student at the university of Athens,
lecturer on philosophy at Rome, and finally priest of Pythian Apollo in his
native city, is at home in many religions. Beside altars to the Greek gods
Dionysus, Herakles, and Artemis, in his own streets, were those of the
Egyptian Isis and Anubis. The treatise on Isis and Osiris (commonly
ascribed to him) is an early essay in comparative religion. In the latter half
of the second century the traveller Pausanias passes through Greece,
describing its sacred sites, noting its monuments, recording mythological
traditions, and observing archaic rites. In this fascinating guide-book to
religious practice are survivals of ancient savagery, still lingering at country
shrines, set down with curious unconsciousness of their significance. The
historical method is as yet only in its infancy. But Pausanias rightly
discerned that its first business is to know the facts.

In Rome, where ritual tradition held its ground with extraordinary

tenacity amid the decay of belief, Marcus Terentius Varro, renowned for his
wide learning (116-28 B.C.), devoted sixteen books of his great treatise on
Antiquities to "Divine Things." Like so many other precious works of
ancient literature it has disappeared, but its contents are partly known
through its use by St. Augustine in his famous work on "The City of God."
Following a division of the gods by the chief pontiff Mucius Scævola, he
treated religion under three heads. In the form presented by the poets' tales
of the gods it was mythical. Founded by the philosophers upon nature
(physis) it was physical. As administered by priests and practised in cities it
was civil. It was an old notion that religion was a legal convention imposed
by authority for purposes of popular control; and Varro does not disdain to
declare it expedient that States should be deceived in such matters. This
police-notion long regulated public custom, and tended to render the
identification of deities presenting superficial resemblances all the more
easy.

By this time the origin of the term "religion" had begun to excite interest,
as its meaning began slowly to change. Varro's contemporaries, Cicero
(106-43 B.C.) and Lucretius (about 97-53), discussed its derivation. Cicero
connected it with the root legere, to "string together," to "arrange"; while
Lucretius found its origin in ligare, to "bind." Philology gives little help
when it speaks with uncertain voice. More important is the primitive
meaning which Mr. Warde Fowler defines as "the feeling of awe, anxiety,
doubt, or fear, which is aroused in the mind by something that cannot be
explained by a man's experience or by the natural course of cause and
effect, and which is therefore referred to the supernatural." It has nothing to
do at the outset with any special rites or doctrines. It is not concerned with
state-usage or with priestly law. In its adjectival form "religious days" or
"religious places" are not days or places consecrated by official practice;
they are days and places which have gathered round them man's sentiments
of awe and scruple. The word thus came to be applied to anything that was
in some way a source or embodiment of mysterious forces. The naturalist
Pliny can even say that no animal is "more full of religion than the mole,"
because strange medicinal powers were supposed to reside in its heart and
teeth.

But, on the other hand, a new use of it passes into Roman literature in
the writings of Cicero. The feeling of awe still lies in the background, but
the word takes on a reference to the acts which it prompts, and thus comes
to denote the whole group of rites performed in honour of some divine
being. These make up a particular cult or worship, ordained and sanctioned
by authority or tradition. "Religion" thus comes to mean a body of religious
duties, the entire series of sacred acts in which the primitive feeling is
expressed. Roman antiquity conceived these as under the care of
priesthoods, legitimated by the State. Around them lay a fringe of
superstitions, which a hostile critic like Lucretius could also sum up under
the same term. And thus in an age when philosophy was addressing itself to
the whole question of man's relation to the world and its unseen Rulers, and
a single word was wanted to describe his attitude to the varied spectacle,
"religion" was at hand to fill the place. It covered the whole field of human
experience, and as different nations presented it in different forms, it
became possible to speak of "religions" in the sense of separate systems of
worship and belief. The champion of Christianity naturally distinguished his
religion as the true from the false; and over against the multiformity of
polytheism he set the unity of the faith of the Church.

Of these "religions" history and philosophy sought to give some account.

As will be seen hereafter (Chap. VI), Babylon and Egypt both claimed a
divine origin for their rites, their arts, and laws. Plutarch expressly defends
the idea of revelation in the cases of Minos of Crete, the Persian Zoroaster,
Zaleucus the shepherd legislator of the Locrians, Numa of Rome, and
others. Pan was in love with Pindar, and Æsculapius conversed with
Sophocles: if such divine diversions were allowed, how much more should
these greater attempts for human welfare be prompted from heaven! Numa
had been enabled through Camena Egeria to regulate the ceremonial law as
priest-king, and pontiffs, augurs, flamens, virgins, received their duties from
him with supernatural sanctions.

Philosophers, on the other hand, discussed the meaning of religion upon

different lines. A wide-spread view already noted presented it as a mere
instrument of policy, devised to overawe the intractable. The diversity of
religions seemed to support this view. Plato's Athenian, in one of his latest
works, the Laws, mentions the teaching of sophists who averred that the
gods existed not by nature but by art, and by the laws of States which are
different in different places, according to the agreement of those who make
them. In a fragment of a drama on Sisyphus ascribed to Critias, the friend of
Alcibiades, it was alleged that in the primeval age of disorder and violence
laws might strike crimes committed in open day, but could not touch secret
sins, hidden in the gloomy depths of conscience. A sage advised that to
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