Pagan Christs

Preface To The Second Edition

Since the first issue of this work in 1903, but especially within the past few years, its main positions have been brought into extensive discussion by other writers, notably in Germany, where the Christusmythe of Professor Arthur Drews has been the theme of many platform debates. The hypothesis of the Pre-Christian Jesus-God, first indicated in Christianity and Mythology, and further propounded in the first edition of this book, has received highly important and independent development at the hands of Professor W. Benjamin Smith in his Der Vorchristliche Jesus (1906), and in the later exposition of Professor Drews. For one whose tasks include other busy fields, it is hardly possible to give this the constant attention it deserves; but the present edition has been as fully revised as might be; and some fresh elucidatory material has been embodied, without, however, any pretence of including the results of the other writers named.

Criticism of the book, so far as I have seen, has been to a surprising degree limited to subsidiary details. The first part, a discussion of the general principles and main results of hierology as regards the reigning religion, has been generally ignored, under circumstances which suggest rather avoidance than dissidence. But much more surprising is the general evasion of the two theses upon which criticism was specially challenged in the Introduction—the theses that the gospel story of the Last Supper, the Agony, the Betrayal, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection is demonstrably not originally a narrative, but a mystery-drama, which has been transcribed with a minimum of modification; and that the mystery-drama was inferribly an evolution from a Palestinian rite of human sacrifice in which the annual victim was Jesus the Son of the Father. Against this twofold position I have seen not a single detailed argument. Writers who confidently and angrily undertake to expose error in another section of the book pass this with at most a defiant shot. Like the legendary Scottish preacher, they recognise a difficult passage, and, having looked it boldly in the face, pass on. Even Professor Schmiedel, to my surprise, abstains from argument on an issue of which his candour and acumen must reveal to him the gravity. It is but fair to say that even sympathetic readers do not often avow entire acquiescence. Professor Drews leaves this an open question. But I should have expected that such a proposition, put forward as capital, would have been dealt with by critics who showed themselves much concerned to discredit the book in general.

They seem to have been chiefly excited about Mithraism, either finding in the account of that ancient cultus a provocation which the other parts of the volume did not yield, or seeing there openings for hostile criticism which elsewhere were not patent. One Roman Catholic ecclesiastic has represented me as a modern apostle of the bull-slaying God. It would seem that a semblance, however illusory, of rivalry in cult propaganda is more evocative of critical conflict than any mere scientific disintegration of the current creed. Of the attacks upon the section Mithraism, as well as of other criticisms of the book, I have given some account in Appendix C. It is to be regretted that it should still be necessary to make replies to criticisms in these matters consist largely of exposures of gross misrepresentation, blundering, bad faith, and bad feeling, as well as bad reasoning, on the part of theological critics. In the case of a hostile critique in the Hibbert Journal, which did not incur these characterisations, I made an amicable appeal for space in which to reply and set forth my own case; but my request was refused.

Broadly speaking, the critical situation is one of ferment rather than of decisive conflict. Those devoted Danaïdes, the professional theologians, continue their labours with the serious assiduity which has always marked them, exhibiting their learned results in dialectic vessels which lack the first elements of retention. The theologians are as much occupied with unrealities to-day, relatively to the advance of thought, and as sure of their own insight, as were their predecessors of three hundred years ago, expounding the functions of the devil. In Germany they are not yet done discussing the inner significance of the tale of Satan's carrying Jesus to the pinnacle of the temple or to a mountain top. Professor Zahn circumspectly puts it that Jesus felt himself so carried. Friedrich Spitta as circumspectly replies that that is not what the gospels say, but does not press that point to finality. Professor Harnack pronounces that the story in Matthew is the older. Spitta cogently proves that it is the later, and that Mark has minimised Luke. Wellhausen's theory of the priority of Mark he shows to be finally untenable; and his own conclusion he declares to give a decisive result as regards the life of Jesus—namely, that Jesus believed firmly in his Messiah-ship from the moment of his baptism onwards, and that he held by it in terms of his own inner experience of divine and fiendish influences. 1 And this is history, as written by scholarly theological experts. The fact that the whole Temptation story is rationally traceable to a Babylonian sculpture of the Goat-God beside the Sun-God, interpreted by Greeks and Romans successively as an education of Apollo or Jupiter by Pan on a mountain top, or a musical contest between them, has never entered the experts’ consciousness. They are writing history in the air. Spitta confidently decides that neither the community nor the disciples nor Paul set up the Messianic conception of Jesus; and yet he has not a word to say on the problem of Paul's entire ignorance of the Temptation story. Seventy years before, our own experts had ascertained with equal industry and certainty that most probably our Lord was placed [by Satan] not on the sheer descent [from the temple] into the valley (Jos. War, V, v, 2; Ant. XV, xi, 5), but on the side next the court where stood the multitude to whom He might thus announce himself from Dan. vii, 13 (1 Chron. xxi, 16), see Bp. Pearson, VII, f. and g. Solomon's porch was a cross building to the temple itself, and rose 120 cubits above it. From the term used by both Evangelists, it is certain that the Tempter stood on no part (το ῦ ναο ῦ ) of the sanctuary . 2 Thus does the expert elucidation of the impossible go on through the generations. The experts of to-day are for the most part as far behind the historic science of their time as were their predecessors; and their results are just as nugatory as the older. But they are just as certain as were their predecessors that they are at the true point of view, and have all the historical facts in hand.

Orthodox and heterodox alike, in the undertaking to set forth the manner of the rise of Christianity, either wholly disregard the principles of historical proof or apply these principles arbitrarily, at their own convenience. Pfleiderer, latterly more and more bitterly repugning the interpretations of other scholars, alternately represented the personality of Jesus as a profoundly obscure problem, and offered fallacious elucidations thereof, with perfect confidence in his own selection of certainties. 3 Dr. Heinrici, offering a comprehensive view of Das Urchristentum (1902), ignores all historical difficulties on the score that he is discussing not the truth but the influence of Christianity, and so sets forth a copious account of the psychology of the Gospel Jesus which for critical science has no validity whatever. Dr. Schweitzer, in his Von Reimarus zu Wrede (Eng. trans., The Quest of the Historical Jesus, 1910), after ably confuting all the current conceptions of the Founder, sets forth one which incurs fatal criticism as soon as it is propounded. 4

The old fashion of manipulating the evidences, on the other hand, is still practised from time to time even by distinguished experts like Professor Bousset, a scholar who has done original and important work in outlying provinces of research. But how little critical validity attaches to Bousset's vindication of the main Christian tradition has been crushingly set forth in the brochure of the late Pastor Kalthoff, Was wissen wir von Jesus? (Lehmann, Berlin: 1904), in reply to Bousset's discourse under the same title. Professing, for instance, to found on such historical data as the mention of an otherwise unknown Chrestus by Suetonius, Bousset deliberately denaturalises the passage to suit his purpose, and then makes it vouch for a Christian community at Rome when none such can be shown to have existed. Kalthoff rightly likens such a handling of documents to the methods of the professed rationalisers denounced by Lessing in his day. Many of the liberal school of to-day are in fact at the standpoint of the semi-rationalist beginnings of Biblical criticism among the eighteenth-century deists; on behalf of whom we can but say that they were at least sincere pioneers, and that Lessing, in substituting for their undeveloped critical method the idea of a divine Education of Mankind through all religious systems alike, retrograded to a standpoint where the rational interpretation of history ceases to be possible, and where the critic stultifies himself by censuring processes of thought which, on his own principles, should be envisaged as part of the divine scheme of education. Yet that nugatory formula in turn is pressed into the service of a theology which is consistent only in refusing to submit to scientific and logical tests.

Then we have the significant portent of the pseudo-biological school of the Rev. Mr. Crawley, 5 according to which nothing in religion is new and nothing true, but all is more or less productive of vitality, and therefore precious, so that no critical analysis matters. Here the tribunals of historical and moral truth are brazenly closed; and the critical issue is referred to one commissioned for the instant by the defender of the faith, whose hand-to-mouth interpretations and generalisations of Christian history, worthy of a neophyte's essay, are complacently put forth as the vindication of beliefs and rites that are admittedly developments from mere savagery. And this repudiation of all intellectual morals, this negation of the very instinct of truth, is profusely flavoured with a profession of zeal for the morals of sex and the instinct of life. Incidentally, too, an argument which puts all critical tests out of court is from time to time tinted with a suggestion of decent concern for historical research.

So, too, among the scholars who reconstruct Christian origins at will, some profess to apply a critical method or set of methods by which they can put down all challenges of the reality of their subject-matter. In Appendix C, I have shown what such method is worth in the hands of Professor Carl Clemen. Their general procedure is simply that of scholastics debating in vacuo, assuming what they please, and rejecting what they please. It is the method by which whole generations of their predecessors elucidated the details of the sacerdotal system of the Hebrews in the wilderness, until Colenso—set doubting about sacred tradition by an intelligent Zulu—established arithmetically the truth of Voltaire's verdict that the whole thing was impossible. Then the experts, under cover of orthodox outcry, changed the venue, avowing no shame for their long aberration. In due time the modern specialists, or their successors, will realise that their main positions as to Christian origins are equally fabulous; but they or their successors will continue to be conscious of their professional perspicacity, and solemnly or angrily contemptuous of all lay criticism of their method. Wir Gelehrten vom Fach, they still call themselves in Germany—we scholars by profession—thus disposing of all lay criticism.

It is not surprising that alongside of this vain demonstration of the historicity of myth there spreads, among determined believers in the historicity, an uneasy disposition to ground faith on the very to believe, called by the name of spiritual experience. With a confidence equal to that of the professional documentists, such believers maintain that their own spiritual autobiographies can establish the historical actuality of what rationalist critics describe as ancient myths. "The heart answers, I have felt. Some of these reasoners, proceeding on the lines of the pseudo-Paul (1 Cor. ii), dispose inexpensively of the historical critic by calling him impercipient. They themselves are the percipients vom Fach." Other apologists, with a little more modesty, reiterate their conviction that the Christian origins must have been what they have been accustomed to think—that no religious movement can have risen without a revered Founder, and that the spread and duration of the Christian movement prove its Founder to have been a very great personality indeed. Abstractly put, such a theorem logically ends in the bald claim of the theorist to special percipience, and a denial of percipience to all who refuse their assent.

It has latterly come to be associated, however, with an appeal to historical analogy in the case of the modern Persian movement of the Bâb, the lessons of which in this connection have been pressed upon orthodox believers by the late Mr. Herbert Rix. Mr. Rix, whose personality gave weight and interest to all his views, seems to have set out as a Unitarian preacher with a fixed belief in the historicity of the Gospel Jesus, despite a recognition of the weakness of the historical basis. Noting with what a childlike mind those ancient Christians came to all questions of external fact—how independent of external fact the truth they lived by really was, 6 he yet assumed that any tale passed on by such believers must have had a basis in a great personality. Those gospel stories, he wrote, "come down to us by tradition handed on by the lips of ignorant peasants, so that we can never be quite sure that we have the precise truth about any incident." 7 Here both the positive and the negative assumptions are invalid. We do not know that all the gospel stories were passed on by peasants; and we never know whether there was any historical basis whatever for any one tale. But on such assumptions Mr. Rix founded an unqualified conviction that the Gospel Jesus headed a new spiritual era, altered the whole face of things, gave us a new principle to live by, and revolutionised the whole world of human affection; 8 and in his posthumous work, Rabbi, Messiah, and Martyr (1907), he presents one more Life of Jesus framed on the principle of excluding the supernatural and taking all the rest of the gospels as substantially true.

Yet towards the close of his life he seems to have realised either that this process was illicit or that it could not claim acceptance on historical grounds. Writing on the Bâb movement, he speaks not only of "those belated theologians who still think the case of a supernatural Christianity can be historically proved by evidence drawn from the latter part of the first century, but of the utter insecurity of the historical foundation of Christianity; and he avows how hopeless it is to try to base religion upon historical documents." 9 Then comes the exposition of how the Bâb movement rose in the devotion evoked by a remarkable personality; and how within thirty years the original account of the Founder was so completely superseded by a legendary account, full of miracles, that only one copy of the original document, by a rare chance, has survived.

The argument now founded on this case is an attempt to salve the historicity of Jesus in surrendering the records. Renan pointed to the Bâb movement as showing how an enthusiastic cult could arise and spread rapidly in our own day by purely natural forces. Accepting that demonstration, the Neo-Unitarians press the corollary that the Bâb movement shows how rapidly myth can overgrow history, and that we have now a new analogical ground for believing that Jesus, like the Bâb, was an actual person, of great persuasive and inspiring power. But while the plea is perfectly reasonable, and deserves every consideration, it is clearly inconclusive. Cult beginnings are not limited to one mode; and the fatal fact remains that the beginnings of the Christist cult are wrapped in all the obscurity which surrounds the alleged Founder, while we have trustworthy contemporary record of the beginnings of the Bâb movement. Place the two cases beside that of the Bacchic cult in Greece, and we have a cult-type in which wild devotion is given to a wholly mythical Founder. The rationalist critic does not affirm the impossibility of an evolution of the Christist movement on the lines of that of the Bâb: he leaves such à priori reasoning to the other side, simply insisting that there is no good historical evidence whatever, while there are strong grounds for inferring a mythical foundation. And those who abstractly insist on the historicity of Jesus must either recede from their position or revert to claims expressive merely of the personal equation—statements of the convincing force of their religious experience, or claims to a special faculty of percipience. To all such claims the sufficient answer is that, arrogance apart, they are matched and cancelled by similar claims on the part of believers in other creeds; and that they could have been advanced with as much justification by ancient believers in Dionysos and Osiris, who had no more doubt of the historicity of their Founders than either an orthodox or a Unitarian Christian has to-day concerning the historicity of Jesus. In short, the closing of historical problems by insistence on the personal equation is no more permissible among intellectual freemen than the settling of scientific questions thereby. Callous posterity, if not contemporary criticism, ruthlessly puts aside the personal equation in such matters, and reverts to the kind of argument which proceeds upon common grounds of credence and universal canons of evidence.

And this reversion is now in process. Already the argument for the historicity of the main gospel narrative is being largely grounded even by some experts on the single datum of the mention of brethren of the Lord, and James the brother of the Lord, in two of the Pauline epistles. This thesis is embodied in one of the ablest arguments on the historicity question that I have met with. It was put in a letter to me by a lay correspondent, open-mindedly seeking the truth by fair critical tests. He began by arguing that the data of a Paul party, a Cephas party, and an Apollos party in Corinth, if accepted as evidence for the personalities of the three party-leaders named, carry with them the inference of a Christ of whom some logia were current. If then the writer of the epistle—whether Paul or another—ignored such logia, the silence of Paul is no argument for ignorance of such logia in general. This ingenious argument, I think, fails in respect of its unsupported premiss. Christists might call themselves of Christ simply by way of disavowing all sectarian leadership. On the face of the case, the special converts of Paul were Christists without any logic of Christ to proceed upon. Equally ingenious, but I think equally inconclusive, is the further argument that the challenge, Have I not seen Jesus our Lord? (1 Cor. ix, 1), implies that Paul's status was discredited on the score that he had not seen the Lord, while other apostles had. But the dispute here turns finally on the question of the authenticity of the epistle as a whole, or the chapter or the plea in particular. As coming from Paul, it is a weak plea: multitudes were said to have seen Jesus; the apostle would have claimed, if anything, authorisation by Jesus. But as a traditional claim it is intelligible enough. Now, this portion of the epistle is one of those most strongly impugned by the tests of Van Manen as betraying a late authorship and standpoint—that of ecclesiastics standing for their income and their right to marry. The conception of Paul battling against his converts for his salary and the right to lead about a wife, within a few pages of his declaration (vii, 8-9) to the unmarried and to widows, It is good for them if they abide even as I; but if they have not continency, let them marry—this is staggering even to believers in the authenticity of the four or all of the epistles, and gives the very strongest ground for treating the irreconcilable passage in chapter ix, if not the whole chapter, as a subsequent interpolation. That the same hand penned both passages is incredible.

Thus we come to the brethren of the Lord with an indestructible presumption against the text. They are mentioned as part of the case for that claim to marry which is utterly excluded by chapter vii. And the claim for salaries and freedom to marry is as obviously likely to be the late interpolation as is the doctrine of asceticism to be the earlier. Given then the clear lateness of the passage, what does the phrase brethren of the Lord prove? That at a period presumably long subsequent to that of Paul there was a tradition of a number of Church leaders or teachers so named. Who were they? They are never mentioned in the Acts. They are never indicated in the gospels. Brethren of Jesus are there referred to (Mt. xii, 46, xiii, 55; Mk. iii, 31, 32; Lk. viii, 19, 20; Jn. vii, 3, 5, 10); but, to say nothing of the facts that three of these passages are plainly duplicates, and that only in one are any of the brethren named, there is never the slightest suggestion that any one of them joined the propaganda. On the contrary, it is expressly declared that even his brethren did not believe on him (Jn. vii, 5). How then, on that basis, supposing it to have a primary validity, are we to accept the view that the James of Gal. i, 19, was a uterine brother or a half-brother of the Founder, who before Paul's advent had come to something like primacy in the Church, without leaving even a traditional trace of him as a brother of Jesus in the Acts?

Either the gospel data are historically decisive or they are not. By excluding them from his pillar texts 10 Professor Schmiedel admits that they are bound up with the supernatural view of Jesus. The resort to the argument from the epistles is a partial confession that the whole gospel record is open to doubt; and that the specification of four brothers and several sisters of Jesus in one passage is a perplexity. It has always been so. Several Fathers accounted for them as children of Joseph by a former wife; several others made them children of Clopas and the other Mary, and so only cousins of Jesus. If the gospel record is valid evidence, the question is at an end. If it is not, the evidence from the epistles falls. Brethren of the Lord is a late allusion, which may stand for a mere tradition or may tell of a group name; and the mention of James as a brother (with no hint of any others) in the epistle to the Galatians can perfectly well be an interpolation, even supposing the epistle to be genuine.

I have here examined the whole argument because it is fully the strongest known to me on the side of the historicity of Jesus; and I am concerned to evade nothing. The candid reader, I think, will admit that even if he holds by the historicity it cannot be established on the grounds in question. He will then, I trust, bring an open mind to bear on the whole reasoning of the Second Part of the ensuing treatise.

As in the case of the second edition of Christianity and Mythology I am deeply indebted to Mr. Percy Vaughan for carefully reading the proofs of these pages, and revising the Index.

April, 1911.

Introduction

My purpose in grouping the four ensuing studies is to complement and complete the undertaking of a previous volume, entitled Christianity and Mythology. That was substantially a mythological analysis of the Christian system, introduced by a discussion of mythological principles in that particular connection and in general. The bulk of the present volume is substantially a synthesis of Christian origins, introduced by a discussion of the principles of hierology. Such discussion is still forced on sociology by the special pleaders of the prevailing religion. But the central matter of the book is its attempt to trace and synthesise the real lines of growth of the Christian cultus; and it challenges criticism above all by its theses—(1) that the gospel story of the Last Supper, Passion, Betrayal, Trial, Crucifixion, and Resurrection, is visibly a transcript of a Mystery Drama, and not originally a narrative; and (2) that that drama is demonstrably (as historic demonstration goes) a symbolic modification of an original rite of human sacrifice, of which it preserves certain verifiable details.

That the exact point of historic connection between the early eucharistic rite and the late drama-story has still to be traced, it is needless to remark. Had direct evidence on this head been forthcoming, the problem could not so long have been ignored. But it is here contended that the lines of evolution are established by the details of the record and the institution, in the light of the data of anthropology; and that we have thus at last a scientific basis for a history of Christianity. As was explained in the introduction to Christianity and Mythology, these studies originated some twenty-five years back in an attempt to realise and explain The Rise of Christianity Sociologically Considered; and it is as a beginning of such an exposition that the two books are meant to be taken. In A Short History of Christianity the general historic conception is outlined; and the present volume offers the detailed justification of the views there summarily put as to Christian origins, insofar as they were not fully developed in the earlier volume. On one point, the origins of Manichæism, the present work departs from the ordinary historic view, which was accepted in the Short History; the proposed rectification here being a result of the main investigation. In this connection it may be noted that Schwegler had already denied the historicity of Montanus—a thesis which I have not sought to incorporate, though I somewhat incline to accept it.

Whether or not I am able to carry out the original scheme in full, I am fain to hope that these inquiries will be of some small use towards meeting the need which motived them. Mythology has permanently interested me only as throwing light on hierology; and hierology has permanently interested me only as throwing light on sociology. The third and fourth sections of this book, accordingly, are so placed with a view to the comparative elucidation of the growth of Christianity. If it be objected that they are thus tendency writings, the answer is that they were independently done, and are as complete as I could make them in the space. Both are revisions and expansions of lectures formerly published in "The Religious Systems of the World," that on Mithraism being now nearly thrice its original length. Undertaken and expanded without the aid of Professor Cumont's great work, Textes et Monuments Figurés relatifs aux Mystéres de Mithra (1896-9), it has been revised in the welcome light of that magistral performance. To M. Cumont I owe much fresh knowledge, and the correction of some errors, as well as the confirmation of several of my conclusions; and if I have ventured here and there to dissent from him, and above all to maintain a thesis not recognised by him—that Mithra in the legend made a Descent into Hell—I do so only after due hesitation.

The non-appearance of any other study of Mithraism in English may serve as my excuse for having carried my paper into some detail, especially by way of showing how much the dead cult had in common with the living. Christian origins cannot be understood without making this comparison. It is significant, however, of our British avoidance of comparative hierology wherever it bears on current beliefs, that while Germany has contributed to the study of Mithraism, among many others, the learned treatise of Windischmann and that in Roscher's Lexikon, France the zealous researches of Lajard, and Belgium the encyclopædic and decisive work of Professor Cumont, England has produced not a single independent book on the subject. In compensation for such neglect, we have developed a signal devotion to Folklore. If some of the favour shown to that expansive study be turned on serious attempts to understand the actual process of growth of world-religions, the present line of research may be extended to advantage.

The lecture on the religions of Ancient America has in turn been carefully revised and much enlarged, not because this subject is equally ignored among us—for there is a sufficiency of information upon it in English, notably in one of the too-little utilised collections of " Descriptive Sociology compiled for Mr. Spencer—but because again the comparative bearing of the study of the dead cults on that of the living has not been duly considered. In particular I have entered into some detail tending to support the theory—not yet to be put otherwise than as a disputed hypothesis—that certain forms and cults of human sacrifice, first evolved anciently in Central Asia, passed to America on the east, and to the Semitic peoples on the west, resulting in the latter case in the central mystery" of Christianity, and in the former in the Mexican system of human sacrifices. But the psychological importance of the study does not, I trust, solely stand or fall with that theory. On the general sociological problem, I may say, a closer study of the Mexican civilisation has dissolved an opinion I formerly held—that it might have evolved from within past the stage of human sacrifice had it been left to itself.

Whatever view be taken of the scope of religious heredity, there will remain in the established historic facts sufficient justification for the general title of Pagan Christs, which best indicates in one phrase the kinship of all cults of human sacrifice and theophagous sacrament, as well as of all cults of which the founder figures as an inspired teacher. That principle has already been broadly made good on the first side by the incomparable research of Dr. J. G. Frazer, to whose " Golden Bough" I owe both theoretic light and detail knowledge. I ask, therefore, that when I make bold to reject Dr. Frazer's suggested solution (ed. 1900) of the historic problem raised by the parallel between certain Christian and non-Christian sacra, I shall not be supposed to undervalue his great treasury of ordered knowledge. On the question of the historicity of Founders, I have made answer in the second edition of Christianity and Mythology to certain strictures of his which seem to me very ill-considered. What I claim for my own solution is that it best satisfies the ruling principles of his own hierology.

In this connection, however, I feel it a duty to avow that the right direction had previously been pointed out by the late Grant Allen in his Evolution of the Idea of God (1897), though at the outset of his work he obscured it for many of us by insisting on the absolute historicity of Jesus, a position which later-on he in effect abandons. It is after ostensibly setting out with the actuality of Jesus the son of the carpenter as an unassailable Rock of solid historical fact (p. 16) that he incidentally (p. 285) pronounces the Christian legend to have been mainly constructed out of the details of such early god-making sacrifices as that practised by the Khonds. Finally (p. 391) he writes that at the outset of our inquiry we had to accept crudely the bare fact that the cult arose at a certain period, and that we can now see that it was but one more example of a universal god-making tendency in human nature. Returning to Allen's book after having independently worked out in detail precisely such a derivation and such a theory, I was surprised to find that where he had thus thrown out the clue I had not on a first reading been at all impressed by it. The reason probably was that for me the problem had been primarily one of historical derivation, and that Allen offered no historical solution, being satisfied to indicate analogies. And it was probably the still completer disregard of historical difficulties that brought oblivion upon the essay of Herr Kulischer, Das Leben Jesu eine Sage von dem Schicksale and Erlebnissen der Bodenfrucht, insbesondere der sogenannten palästinensischen Erstlingsgarbe, die am Passahfeste im Tempel dargebracht wurde (Leipzig, 1876), in which Dr. Frazer's thesis of the vegetal character of the typical slain and rearising deity is put forth without evidence, but with entire confidence.

Kulischer had simply posited the analogy of the Vegetation-God and the vegetation-cult as previous students had done that of the Sun-God and the sun-myth, not only without tracing any process of transmutation, but with a far more arbitrary interpretation of symbols than they had ventured on. His essay thus remains only a remarkable piece of pioneering, which went broadly in the right direction, but missed the true path.

It is not indeed to be assumed that if he had made out a clear historical case it would have been listened to by his generation. The generation before him had paid little heed to the massive and learned treatise of Ghillany, Die Menschenopfer der alten Hebräer (1842), wherein the derivation of the Passover from a rite of human sacrifice is well made out, and that of the Christian eucharist from a modified Jewish sacrament of theophagy is at least strikingly argued for. Ghillany had further noted some of the decisive analogies of sacrificial ritual and gospel narrative which are founded on in the following pages; and was substantially on the right historic track, though he missed some of the archæological proofs of the prevalence of human sacrifice in pre-exilic Judaism. Daumer, too, went far towards a right historical solution in his work Der Feuer and Molochdienst der alten Hebräer, which was synchronous with that of his friend Ghillany, and again in his treatise Die Geheimnisse des christlichen Alterthums (1847). His later proclamation of Meine Conversion(1859) would naturally discredit his earlier theses; but the disregard of the whole argument in the hierology of that day is probably to be explained as due to the fact that the conception of a science of religions—specified by Vinet in 1856 as beginning to grow up alongside of theology—had not then been constituted for educated men. The works of Ghillany and Daumer have been so far forgotten that not till my own research had been independently made and elaborated did I meet with them.

To-day, the conditions of hierological research are very different. A generation of students is now steeped in the anthropological lore of which Ghillany, failing to profit by the lead of Constant, noted only the details preserved in the classics and European histories; and the scientific significance of his and Daumer's and Kulischer's theories is clear in the light of the studies of Tylor, Spencer, and Frazer. Grant Allen, with the ample materials of recent anthropology to draw upon, made a vital advance by connecting the central Christian legend with the whole process of religious evolution, in terms not of à priori theology but of anthropological fact. If, however, the lack of historical demonstration, and the uncorrected premiss of a conventional historical view, made his theory at first lack significance for a reader like myself, it has probably caused it to miss its mark with others. That is no deduction from its scientific merit; but it may be that the historical method will assist to its appreciation. It was by way of concrete recognition of structural parallelism that I reached the theory, having entirely forgotten, if I had ever noted, Allen's passing mention of one of the vital details in question—that of the breaking of the legs of victims in primitive human sacrifice. In 1842 Ghillany had laid similar stress on the detail of the lance-thrust in the fourth gospel, to which he adduced the classic parallel noted hereinafter. And when independent researches thus yield a variety of particular corroborations of a theory reached otherwise by a broad generalisation, the reciprocal confirmation is, I think, tolerably strong. The recognition of the Gospel Mystery-Play, it is here submitted, is the final historical validation of the whole thesis, which might otherwise fail to escape the fate of disregard which has thus far befallen the most brilliant speculation of the à priori mythologists in regard to the Christian legend, from the once famous works of Dupuis and Volney down to the little noticed Letture sopra la mitologia vedica of Professor de Gubernatis.

However that may be, Grant Allen's service in the matter is now from my point of view unquestionable. Of less importance, but still noteworthy, is Professor Huxley's sketch of The Evolution of Theology, with which, while demurring to some of what I regard as its uncritical assumptions (accepted, I regret to say, by Allen, in his otherwise scientific ninth chapter), I find myself in considerable agreement on Judaic origins. Professor Huxley's essay points to the need for a combination of the studies of hierology and anthropology in the name of sociology, and on that side it would be unpardonable to omit acknowledgment of the great work that has actually been done for sociological synthesis. I am specially bound to make it in view of my occasional dissent on anthropological matters from Spencer. Such dissent is apt to suggest difference of principle in a disproportionate degree; and Spencer's own iconoclasm has latterly evoked a kind of criticism that is little concerned to avow his services. It is the more fitting that such a treatise as the present should be accompanied by a tribute to them. However his anthropology may have to be modified in detail, it remains clear to some of us, whom it has enlightened, that his elucidations are of fundamental importance, all later attempts being related to them, and that his main method is permanently valid.

In regard to matters less habitually contested, it is perhaps needless to add that I am as little lacking in gratitude for the great scholarly services rendered to all students of hierology by Professor Rhys Davids, when I venture to withstand his weighty opinion on Buddhist origins. My contrary view would be ill-accredited indeed if I were not able to support it with much evidence yielded by his scholarship and his candour. And it is perhaps not unfitting that, by way of final word of preface to a treatise which sets out with a systematic opposition to the general doctrine of Dr. F. B. Jevons, I acknowledge that I have profited by his survey of the field, and even by the suggestiveness of some of his arguments that seem to me to go astray.

PART 1. THE RATIONALE OF RELIGION

CHAPTER 1. THE NATURALNESS OF ALL BELIEF

1. Origin of the Gods from Fear

It seems probable, despite theological cavils, that Petronius was right in his signal saying, Fear first made the Gods. In the words of a recent hierologist, "we may be sure that primitive man took to himself the credit of his successful attempts to work the mechanism of nature for his own advantage, but when the machinery did not work he ascribed the fault to some over-ruling supernatural power.....It was the violation of [previously exploited] sequences, and the frustration of his expectations, by which the belief in supernatural power was, not created, but first called forth." 11

The fact that this writer proceeds to repudiate his own doctrine 12 is no reason why we should, save to the extent of noting the temerity of his use of the term supernatural. There are some very strong reasons, apart from the à priori one cited above, for thinking that the earliest human notions of superhuman beings were framed in terms of fear. Perhaps the strongest of all is the fact that savages and barbarians in nearly all parts of the world appear to regard disease and death as invariably due to purposive hostile action, whether normal, magical, or spiritual. 13 Not even old age is for many of these primitive thinkers a probable natural cause of death. 14 If then the life of early man was not much less troublous than that of contemporary primitives, he is likely to have been moved as much as they to conceive of the unseen powers as malevolent. On the Gold Coast, says a close student, the majority of these spirits are malignant......I believe that originally all were conceived as malignant. 15

And how, indeed, could it be otherwise? Those who will not assent have forgotten, as indeed most anthropologists strangely forget when they are discussing the beginnings of religion, that man as we know him is descended from something less human, more brute, something nearer the predatory beast life of fear and foray. When in the period of upward movement which we term civilisation, as distinct from animal savagery, there could arise thrills of yearning or gratitude towards unknown powers, we are æons off from the stage of subterhuman growth in which the germs of conceptual religion must have stirred. If the argument is to be that there is no religion until man loves his Gods, let it be plainly put, and let not a verbal definition become a petitio principii. If, again, no numina are to be termed Gods but those who are loved, let that proposition too be put as a simple definition of term. But if we are to look for the beginnings of the human notion of numina, of unseen spirits who operate in Nature and interfere with man, let it be as plainly put that they presumably occurred when fear of the unknown was normal, and gratitude to an Unknown impossible.

But in saying that fear first made the Gods, or made the first Gods, we imply that other God-making forces came into play later; and no dispute arises when this is affirmed of the process of making the Gods of the higher religions, in their later forms. Even here, at the outset, the play of gratitude is no such ennobling exercise as to involve much lifting of the moral standpoint; and even in the higher religions gratitude to the God is often correlative with fear of the evil spirits whom he wards off. This factor is constantly present in the gospels and in the polemic of the early Fathers; 16 and has never disappeared from religious life. The pietist who in our own day pours out thanks to Providence for saving him in the earthquake in which myriads have perished is no more ethically attractive than philosophically persuasive; and the gratitude of savages and barbarians for favours received and expected can hardly have been more refined. It might even be said that a cruder egoism presides over the making of Good Gods than over the birth of the Gods of Fear; 17 the former having their probable origin in an individualistic as against a tribal instinct. But it may be granted that the God who ostensibly begins as a private guardian angel or family spirit may become the germ of a more ethical cultus than that of the God generically feared. And the process chronically recurs. There is, indeed, no generic severance between the Gods of fear and the Gods of love, most deities of the more advanced races having both aspects: nevertheless, certain specified deities are so largely shaped by men's affections that they might recognisably be termed the Beloved Gods.

It will on the whole be helpful to an understanding of the subject if we name such Gods, in terms of current conceptions, the Christs of the world's pantheon. That title, indeed, no less fitly includes figures which do not strictly rank as Gods; but in thus widely relating it we shall be rather elucidating than obscuring religious history. Only by some such collocation of ideas can the inquirer surmount his presuppositions and take the decisive step towards seeing the religions of mankind as alike man-made. On the other hand, he is not thereby committed to any one view in the field of history proper; he is left free to argue for a historical Christ as for a historical Buddha.

Even on the ground of the concept of evolution, however, scientific agreement is still hindered by persistence in the old classifications. The trouble meets us on one line in arbitrary fundamental separations between mythology and religion, early religion and early ethics, religion and magic, genuine myths and non-genuine myths. 18 On another line it meets us in the shape of a sudden and local reopening of the problem of theistic intervention in a quasi-philosophical form, or a wilful repudiation of naturalistic method when the inquiry reaches current beliefs. Thus results which were reached by disinterested scholarship a generation ago are sought to be subverted, not by a more thorough scholarship, but by keeping away from the scholarly problem and suggesting a new standard of values, open to no rational tests. It may be well, therefore, to clear the ground so far as may be of such dispute at the outset by stating and vindicating the naturalistic position in regard to it.

2. All Belief Results of Reasoning

In the midst of much dispute, moral science approaches agreement on the proposition that all primitive beliefs and usages, however strange or absurd, are to be understood as primarily products of judgment, representing theories of causation or guesses at the order of things. To such agreement, however, hindrance is set up by the reversion of some inquirers to the old view that certain savage notions are irrational in the strict sense. Thus Dr. F. B. Jevons decides that "there is no rational principle of action in taboo: it is mechanical; arbitrary, because its sole basis is the arbitrary association of ideas; irrational, because its principle is [in the words of Mr. Lang] 'that causal connection in thought is equivalent to causative connection in fact.'" 19 Again, Dr. Jevons lays it down 20 that Taboo......is the conviction that there are certain things which must—absolutely must, and not on grounds of experience of 'unconscious utility'—be avoided.

It is significant that in both of these passages the proposition runs into verbal insignificance or counter-sense. In the first cited we are told (1) that a certain association of ideas is arbitrary because its basis is an arbitrary association of ideas, and (2) that it is all the while a causal ( i.e., a non-arbitrary) connection in thought. In the last we are in effect told that the tabooer is conscious that he is not proceeding on an ancestral experience when he is merely not conscious of doing so. When instructed men thus repeatedly lapse into mere nullities of formula, there is presumably something wrong with their theory. Now, the whole subject of taboo is put outside science by the assumption that the practice is in origin irrational and absolute and arbitrary and independent of all experience of utility. As Dr. Jevons himself declares in another connection, the savage's thought is subject to mental laws as much as is civilised man's. How, then, is this dictum to be reconciled with that? What is the law of the savage's arbitrariness?

Conceivably part of it lies before us in Dr. Jevons’s page of denial. The very illustration first given by him for the proposition last cited from him is that the mourner is as dangerous as the corpse he has touched, the mourner is as dangerous to those he loves as to those he hates. Here, one would suppose, was a pretty obvious clue to an intelligible causation. Is it to be arbitrarily decided that primitive men never observed the phenomena of contagion from corpse to mourners, and from mourners to their families; or, observing it, never sought to act on the experience? Is it not notorious that among contemporary primitives there is often an intense and vigilant fear of contagious disease? 21

The only fair objection to accepting such a basis for one species of taboo is that for other species no such explanation is available. But what science looks for in such a matter is not a direct explanation for every instance: it suffices that we find an explanation or explanations for such a principle or conception as taboo, and then recognise that, once set up, it may be turned to really arbitrary account by chiefs, priests, and adventurers.

Arbitrary has two significations, in two references: it means illogical in reference to reason, or representative of one will as against the general will. In the first sense, it is here irrelevant, for no one pretends that taboo is right; but it may apply in the other in a way not intended by Dr. Jevons. For nothing can be more obvious than the adaptability of the idea of taboo, once crystallised or conventionalised in a code, to purposes of individual malice, and to all such procedure as men indicate by the term priestcraft. Dr. Jevons, in his concern to prove, what no one ever seriously disputed, that priests did not and could not create the religious or superstitious instinct, leaves entirely out of his exposition, and even by implication denies, the vitally relevant truth that they exploit it. And in overlooking this he sadly burdens, if he does not wreck, his own unduly biassed theory of the religious instinct as something relatively deep, and as proceeding in terms of an abnormal consciousness of contact with the divine. For if those relatively arbitrary and irrational forms of taboo do not come from the priest—that is, from the religion-maker or -monger, whether official or not—they must, on Dr. Jevons’s own showing, come from religion.

It may be that he would not at once reject such a conclusion; for the apparent motive of much of his treatment of taboo is the sanctification of it as an element in the ancestry of the Christian religion. For this purpose he is ready to go to notable lengths, as when 22 he allows cannibalism to be sometimes religious in intention. But while insisting at one point on the absolute unreasonedness and immediate certitude of the notion of taboo, apparently in order to place it on all fours with the direct consciousness which for him is the mark of a religious belief, he admits in so many words, as we have seen, that it is arbitrary and irrational, which is scarcely a way of accrediting it as a religious phenomenon. Rather the purpose of that aspersion seems to be to open the way for another aggrandisement of religion as having suppressed irrational taboo. On the one hand we are told 23 that the savage's fallacious belief in the transmissibility of taboo was the sheath which enclosed and protected a conception that was to blossom and bear a priceless fruit—the conception of Social Obligation. This is an arguable thesis, not framed by Dr. Jevons for the purposes of his theorem, but spontaneously set forth by several missionaries. 24 Here we need but note the implication of the old fallacy that when any good is seen to follow upon an evil we must assume the evil to have been a conditio sine quâ non of the good. The missionaries and Dr. Jevons have assumed that but for the device of taboo there could have been no social code—a thesis not to be substantiated either deductively or inductively. But with this problem we need not now concern ourselves, since Dr. Jevons himself turns the tables on it. After the claim has been made for the salvatory action of taboo, we read 25 that it was only among the minority of mankind, and there only under exceptional circumstances, that the institution bore its best fruit......Indeed, in many respects the evolution of taboo has been fatal to the progress of humanity. And again:—

In religion the institution also had a baneful effect: the irrational restrictions, touch not, taste not, handle not, which constitute formalism, are essentially taboos—essential to the education of man at one period of his development, but a bar to his progress later.

But now is introduced 26 the theorem of the process by which taboo has been converted into an element of civilisation: it is this:—

From the fallacy of magic man was delivered by religion; and there are reasons.....for believing that it was by the same aid he escaped from the irrational restrictions of taboo. 27

In the higher forms of religion.....the trivial and absurd restrictions are cast off, and those alone retained which are essential to morality and religion. 28

We shall have to deal later with the direct propositions here put; but for the moment it specially concerns us to note that the dénoûment does not hold scientifically or logically good. The fact remains that irrational taboo as such was, in the terms of the argument, strictly religious; that religion in this aspect had no sense in it, inasmuch as taboo had passed from a primitive precaution to a priest-made convention; 29 and that what religion is alleged to deliver man from is just religion. Thus alternately does religion figure for the apologist as a rational tendency correcting an irrational, and as an irrational tendency doing good which a rational one cannot. And the further we follow his teaching the more frequently does such a contradiction emerge.

3. Dr. Jevons’ Theories of Religious Evolution

At the close of his work, apparently forgetting the propositions of his first chapter as to the priority of the sense of obstacle in the primitive man's notion of supernatural forces, Dr. Jevons affirms that the earliest attempt towards harmonising the facts of the external and inner consciousness—by which is meant observation and reflection took the form of ascribing the external prosperity which befell a man to the action of the divine love of which he was conscious within himself; and the misfortunes which befell him to the wrath of the justly offended divine will. 30

Here we have either a contradiction of the thesis before cited, or a resort to the extremely arbitrary assumption that in taking credit to himself for successful management of things, and imputing his miscarriages to a superior power, the primitive man is not trying to harmonise the facts of his experience. Such an argument would be on every ground untenable; but it appears to be all that can stand between Dr. Jevons and self-contradiction. The way to a sound position is by settling impartially the definition of the term religion. How Dr. Jevons misses this may be gathered from the continuation of the passage under notice:—

Man, being by nature religious, began by a religious explanation of nature. To assume, as is often done, that man had no religious consciousness 1, begin with, and that the misfortunes which befell him inspired him with fear, and fear led him to propitiate the malignant beings whom he imagined to be the causes of his suffering, fails to account for the very thing it intended to explain—namely, the existence of religion. It might account for superstitious dread of malignant beings: it does not account for the grateful worship of benignant beings, nor for the universal satisfaction which man finds in that worship. As we have seen, Dr. Jevons himself had at the outset plainly posited what he now describes as a fallacious assumption. On his prior showing, man's experience of apparent hostility in Nature first called forth his belief in supernatural power. The interposed phrase, was not created but, looks like an after attempt to reconcile the earlier proposition with the later. But there is no real reconciliation, for Dr. Jevons thus sets up only the vain suggestion that the primitive man was from the first conscious of the existence of good supernatural powers but did not think they did him any good—another collapse in countersense—or else the equally unmanageable notion that primitive man recognised helpful supernatural being-, but was not grateful to them for their help.

That the argument has not been scientifically conducted is further clear from the use now of the expression superstitious dread as the equivalent of fear, while grateful worship stands for satisfaction. Why superstitious dread and not superstitious gratitude? A scientific inquiry will treat the phenomena on a moral par, and will at this stage simply put aside the term superstition. It is relevant only as imputing a superior degree of gratuitousness of belief (whether by way of fear or of satisfaction) at a comparatively advanced state of culture. To call a savage superstitious when he fears a God, and religious when he thanks one, is not only to warp the science of religion at the start, but to block even the purpose in view, for, as we have seen, Dr. Jevons is constrained by his own motive of edification to assume that the benignant God ought by rights to be sometimes feared.

4. Scientific View of the Religious Evolution

Putting aside as unscientific all such prejudgments, and leaving the professed religionist his personal remedy of discriminating finally between true and false religion, let us begin at the beginning by noting that religious consciousness can intelligibly mean only a given direction of consciousness. And if we are to make any consistent specification of the point at which consciousness begins to be religious, we shall put it impartially in simple animism—the spontaneous surmise, seen to be dimly made or makable even by animals, that not only animals and plants, but inanimate things, may possess life. Dr. Jevons rightly points out 31 that this primary notion "neither proceeds from nor implies nor accounts for belief in the supernatural; and he goes on to show (developing here the doctrine which he ultimately repudiates) how the latter notion would arise through man's connecting with certain agencies or spirits the frustrative or molestive power which he had already found to exercise an unexpected and irresistible control over his destiny. In this way, continues Dr. Jevons, suddenly granting much more than he need or ought, the notion of supernatural power, which originally was purely negative and manifested itself merely in suspending or counteracting the uniformity of nature, came to have a positive content." From this point, as might have been divined, the argument becomes confused to the last degree. We have been brought to the supernatural as a primitive product of ( a) the recognition of irregular and frustrative forces in nature, and ( b) the identification of them as personalities or spirits like man. But immediately, in the interests of another preconception, the theorist proceeds in effect to cancel this by arguing that, when men resort to magic, the idea of the supernatural has disappeared. His proposition is that the belief in the supernatural was prior to the belief in magic, and that the latter, whenever it sprang up, was a degradation or relapse in the evolution of religion, 32 inasmuch as it assumed man's power to control the forces of Nature by certain stratagems. And as he argues at the same time that religion and magic had different origins, and were always essentially distinct from one another, it is implied that religion began in that belief in a (frustrative) supernatural which is asserted to have preceded magic. That is to say, religion began in the recognition of hostile or dangerous powers.

Now, a logically vigilant investigator would either not have said that belief in a supernatural was constituted by the recognition of hostile personal forces