things]. In all these words the derivation of mean- izing sense, which knew how to breathe a higher ing is analogous to the word religious.* life even into inert stone," refused to be confined within the bonds of duty. Lactantius, however, derives religio from religare, to bind back or fast. This meaning is retained in the French religieux, which denotes a person who is bound by vows to a life of sanctity. Critics are pretty evenly divided between these two derivations. Under the first, religion is a voluntary act, either mental or outward, though inspired no doubt by a sense of obligation; under. the second, religion is the sense of obligation, which finds expression in pious feelings and in acts of devotion. In Cicero's meaning, religion corresponds nearly to the German Andacht, "the careful pondering of divine things," which Kant so beautifully describes as "the tuning of the soul to a susceptibility to divinely given impressions." But apart from his etymology of the word religio, Cicero uses the term in a gradation with "piety" and “sanctity," which requires for "religion" the sense of moral obligation: Pietas is a sincere loyal disposition toward those with whom one stands in near relations-relatives, colleagues, superiors, and especially toward the gods as rulers and benefactors. Sanctitas is an irreproachable, faultless carriage toward the gods. But religio is the recognition of the obligation by which one feels himself bound. | With the Greeks, religion, though perhaps more assiduously practiced than among the Romans, was less rigidly defined. Their opnoκeia was religious worship and usages rather than the essence of religion in spirit and motive; evokßeua was the pietas of the Latins, reverence for parents, elders, superiors, authorities, gratitude toward benefactors, though Plato uses this term to describe a reverent devotion toward the gods, and bids us "exhort all men to piety, that we may avoid the evil and obtain the good." ¶ Mommsen goes so far as to say that "the Roman designation of faith, religio-that is to say, that which binds-was in word and in idea alike foreign to the Hellenes."** Perhaps that "ideal “Qui autem omnia, quæ ad cultum deorum pertinerent, diligenter retractarant et tanquam relegerent, sunt dicti religiosi ex religendo, ut elegantes ex eligendo, itemque ex diligendo diligentes, ex intelligendo intelligentes. His enim in verbis omnibus inest vis legendi eadem quæ in religioso."—" De Natura Deorum," lib. ii., What religion was among the Greeks in respect of worship, beliefs, rites, and customs, it is easy to learn from their poets and philosophers, their temples and statues. The presence and in nature and in human affairs; through the Amagency of the gods were universally recognized Phictyons, religious union became the basis of faith and the objects of worship lay an inner political confederation; behind the symbols of spiritual devotion to higher spiritual powers; above the circle of the gods was a supreme unifying principle, rule, or fate; man, as the head of the physical creation, was divinized, and the divinity was humanity idealized. The religion of the Greeks was anthropomorphic, even to reproducing the baser passions of men in the persons of the gods. But all this helps little toward a conception of religion in respect of ground or motive; and in the absence of an infallible hierarchy, a dogmatic revelation, and even of systematic treatises on theology, it is not possible to reduce to a simple definition the Greek conception of religion in itself. This is remarkable if one considers how early the Greek mind showed its bent toward synthesis and speculation; how the Greek poetry is pervaded with the presence of divinity, and Greek philosophy with the ethical sense; and with what a free and unclouded spirit the Greek religion contemplated the relations of the gods with men. Perhaps the very natural and human way in which the lives and doings of the gods were conceived of, and the childlike simplicity with which the gods were honored and served, rendered a definition of religion as difficult and as superfluous as a description of light and air. "The most godly man was he who cultivated in the most thorough manner his human powers, and the essential fulfillment of religious duty lay in this, that every man should do to the honor of the divinity what was most in harmony with his own nature." * Then there was the daípov, or tutelary deity, a connecting link between gods and men, which might be a celestial attraction toward the good or a fatalistic impulse toward the evil, in either case modifying that freedom of choice which gives to actions their moral quality. And yet, by faith in his attending genius, how gradually did Socrates struggle after the pure and just, the beautiful and good! No reader of the "Phaedo" can fail to feel how deep and vital is the religious spirit that here endeavors to give a dialectic form to the conceptions of God, the soul, right, duty, immortality; and yet the highest morality and the high * Zeller, "Die Philosophie der Griechen," erster Theil, vierte Auflage, Einleitung, p. 42. est philosophy combined in the subject and the framer of this most perfect of the Platonic dialogues, have failed to direct us to the origin and nature of the faith which it fundamentally implies. For the mythology of Greece there is a rich vocabulary; for its religion, none. Turning from the greatest sage of Greece to the older sage of China, we find in the dialogues or analects of Confucius a system of social and political ethics pervaded with the religious spirit, but which gives no distinct conception of the nature or the source of religion itself. Customs, ceremonies, proprieties, filial piety, the worship of the spirits of ancestors and of sages, as also of the spirits of the land and of places, these all are enjoined, though in a somewhat formal, perfunctory way, and with no express statement of the principle or the authority upon which their obligation rests. Virtue and righteousness in the outer life are prescribed with a sententious wisdom, but the ultimate law of righteousness, whether in nature, in reason, or in God, is nowhere clearly enunciated. Admirable, indeed, were some of the rules given by Confucius for the conduct of life: "To subdue one's self and return to propriety is perfect virtue"; "Benevolence is to love all men"; "We should be true to the principles of our nature, and the benevolent exercise of them to others"; "Let the will be set on the path of duty"; "Let every attainment in what is good be firmly grasped"; "Let relaxation and enjoyment be found in the polite arts"; "Let every man consider virtue as what devolves on himself. He may not yield the performance of it even to his teacher"; "The man who, when gain is set before him, thinks of righteousness, who, with danger before him, is prepared to give up his life, and who does not forget an old agreement, however far back it extends, such a man may be reckoned a complete man"; "Virtue is more to man than either water or fire. I have seen men die from treading on water and fire, but I have never seen a man die from treading the course of virtue." When, however, he was asked to define virtue, Confucius described it under certain manifestations, without pointing to its inward essence: "To be able to practice five things everywhere under heaven constitutes perfect virtue -to wit, gravity, generosity of soul, sincerity, earnestness, and kindness." Again, he seemed to resolve virtue back into obedience to knowledge: The ancients who wished to exemplify illustrious virtue throughout the empire, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first recti fied their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things. It is a special honor of Confucius that he applied his teachings to the benefit of mankind at large, and had no esoteric doctrines: "The man of perfect virtue, wishing to be established himself, seeks also to establish others: wishing to be enlarged himself, he seeks also to enlarge others." And it is certain that this remarkable sage did anticipate the "Golden Rule" of Christianity, at least upon its negative side: "What I do not wish men to do to me, I also wish not to do to men." A favorite disciple asked, "Is there not one word which may serve as a rule of practice for all one's life?" Confucius answered: "Is not reciprocity such a word? What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others." When, however, we seek for the ultimate principles upon which Confucius founded such lofty precepts of morality, we find a certain vagueness and reserve quite in contrast with the clearness and force of the precepts themselves. Though after his death Confucius was worshiped by his disciples with divine honors, and though he remains to this day a chief object of religious homage to the Chinese nation, he never claimed divinity, and hardly assumed a divine commission and warrant for his teachings. Once, when his life was threatened, he said: "Was not the cause of truth lodged here in me? If Heaven had wished to let this cause of truth perish, then I should not have got such a relation to that cause. While Heaven does not let the cause of truth perish, what can the people of K'wang do to me?" Yet he spoke of himself with humility, as the compiler of the wisdom of the ancients, and not an originator of wisdom or the author of a system. That all which Confucius said and did was prompted by a religious sentiment is the impression one receives from an impartial reading of his works. "Man," said he, "has received his nature from Heaven. Conduct in accordance with that nature constitutes what is right and true-is a pursuing of the proper path. . . . The path may not for an instant be left. . . . There is nothing more visible than what is secret, and nothing more manifest than what is minute, and therefore the superior man is watchful over his aloneness." This seems to carry the distinction of right and wrong behind actions to the innermost thoughts and feelings, and to find in conscience " the eye of the mind" implanted by Heaven. It is held by some commentators on Confucius that he had no conception of a per sonal God, but used the term Heaven impersonally, to denote the pantheistic principle in the universe; but Professor Legge,* whose careful translation and commentary we have followed in the foregoing citations, is of opinion that the term Heaven is fitly explained by "the lofty one who is on high." There seems to be internal evidence of this in the saying of Confucius, "He who offends against Heaven has none to whom he can pray." The idea of offense, of prayer, and of such alienation by offense that prayer can no longer avail, implies the recognition of a personal being, and the term Heaven is but a reverential veil for the name of God. Upon the whole, we may gather from Confucius that religion is an inner sense of rightness or fitness implanted in man by his Creator, and which prompts to reverence toward God and the spirits of sages and of ancestors, to virtue in the conduct of life, and to justice and kindness toward others. Pursuing our analysis of the religious idea to a still more remote antiquity, we pass from China to India, from the preceptive philosophy of Confucius to the mythological poetry of the Vedas.t In Greece were divinities and a worship, but neither sacred books nor a hierarchy; in China, sacred books of morality, and a hierarchy of sages, but in the more ancient times, little of organized worship or of priestly functions; in India, however, as far back as we can trace her records, institutions, traditions, we find sacred writings, a sacred order,‡ and sacred observances, public and domestic: religion the very warp and woof of her literature and history. To a superficial view, the religion of the Vedas might seem a mass of fables worthy of the childhood of the race the crude polytheism of primitive tribes. But in reality this was preeminently the religion of thought-the spiritual nature of man tasking itself with speculations upon the origin of things, and using this visible material universe to personify the spiritual and unseen. Behind the multifarious array of gods and goddesses, and the sensuous, sometimes grossly material, conceptions under which these are presented, there is a subtile spiritual essence which is "the ONE," supreme, infinite, eternal, absolute : There was then neither non-entity nor entity; there was no atmosphere, nor the sky which is above. "The Life and Teachings of Confucius." By James Legge, D. D. + Socrates died B. C. 399; Confucius died B. C. 478. The hymns of the Rig Veda are the most ancient remains of Indian literature. No authority in Sanskrit assigns to these a date more recent than B. C. 1000, while some scholars carry them back to a period between B. C. 2000 and 2400, It is uncertain how old is the origin of four castes, but the priestly office is of great antiquity. ... Death was not then, nor immortality; there was no distinction of day or night. That One breathed calmly, self-supported; there was nothing different from It [that One] or above It.* This abstract, self-sustained essence is afterward described as Mind. "Desire first arose in It, which was the primal germ of mind; [and which] sages, searching with their intellect, discovered in their heart to be the bond which connects entity with non-entity." All the attributes of this mysterious impersonal One are ascribed in different hymns to different divinities, which again are clothed with material forms, and are subject to the incidents and the passions of human life. Thus "Purusha himself is this whole [universe], whatever has been, and whatever shall be. He is also the lord of immortality. . . . This universe was formerly soul only, in the form of Purusha."+ Yet Purusha was born, and was immolated in sacrifice. Again, "This entire [universe] has been created by Brahma." And yet "Brahma the eternal, unchanging, and undecaying, was produced from the ether." These discrepancies are perhaps best harmonized by the supposition that each divinity who is invested with supreme attributes is but another expression for that One who is himself unnameable; or all the several divinities are but members of one soul, attributes or manifestations of the eternal, invisible essence. Whether the Vedic hymns mark an upward tendency of the religious feeling from naturism to theism, and from polytheism to monotheism, or whether their symbolism, like the adornments of a cathedral, used at first to body forth the supersensible, had come to supplant spiritual worship by a species of idolatry, can hardly be determined from the internal evidence of the books or from contemporary monuments or traditions. Rather the subjective and the objective seem here to be combined, to a degree which transcends the union of the subtilties of the schoolmen, with the sensuous worship of images in the middle ages. In the Vedic religion there is scope for every faculty of the human mind-the dialectic, the speculative, the imaginative, the contemplative, the observative-and these all which comprehends all thought, all being, all struggle together to give expression to the theme space, all duration: "There is no great and no small Hardly a theory of physics, hardly a speculation of metaphysics, concerning the origin of things force, motion, heat, evolution, light, spirit - but is anticipated in the Rig Veda. There nature is etherealized and spirit materialized. "The intellectual and the sensible, the ethical and the naturalistic, are there conjoined in the most inartificial and also inseparable way, as kernel and shell in the yet unripe fruit grow indissolubly together." * Nature and soul are one. The powers of nature personified, and by turns invested with all the attributes of Deity, or the universal soul manifesting itself in the phenomena of nature, especially in light-the dawn, the sun, the sky-all-pervading, all-renewing, allbeneficent, these worshiped with hymns, prayers, oblations, represent the religion of India in the oldest and purest of the Vedas. In reading these hymns of more than thirty centuries ago, one is puzzled by the frequent mixture in the same verse of seeming puerility with real profundity. Where we find such metaphysical acumen and such poetic sublimity as often occur in the Rig Veda, it is fair to presume that connected passages, which a literal translation makes meaningless or childish, had a higher meaning, which is veiled from us by some symbol or mystery of language. Yet this very commingling of metaphysical acumen and poetic fervor with a certain childish credulity, which characterizes the Rig Veda, is found also in the Hindoos of to-day. Indeed, as these qualities are combined rather than contrasted in those early hymns, do they not show how human nature, at all points, was open to the influence of religion - the philosophic thought, the poetic fancy, equally with the childlike faith? And if at length materialism shall establish its atomic theory of the universe, this vaunted outcome of physical science could but reaffirm an old metaphysical theory of the Indian mind-the development of the universe from motion and heat, "impregnating powers and mighty forces, a selfsupporting principle beneath, and energy aloft." + If physical science would make God the sum of all the forces of the universe," the Vedic religion made of Nature "a metaphysical deity." Recent researches in Babylon have brought to light evidences of a religion there remarkable for simplicity and purity-teaching the unity of God and doctrines concerning sin, forgiveness, and the resurrection of the body, with singular analogies on some points to the Hebrew Scriptures. But, as there is still some controversy among Assyrian scholars concerning the proxi * Professor O. Pfleiderer, "Die Religion, ihr Wesen und ihr Geschichte," vol. ii., p. 82. + Rig Veda, x., 129. Sayce's "Lectures on Babylonian Literature." mate date of these memorials and their inscriptions, we simply bring them into notice here, and pass to a single additional example. Older than the oldest of the Vedas, and with the possible exception just mentioned, the most ancient landmark between the prehistoric chaos and the recorded course of the world's history is the religion of Egypt, as read in her temples and monuments, and especially in the "Book of the Dead." If in the liturgy of Egypt, as in that of India, we find a mingling of the puerile and grotesque with the thoughtful and sublime, there is, on the whole, in the faith of Egypt more of mystery, and in her worship more of majesty. In Egypt, as in India, we find in the religious odes a frequent interblending of subjective and objective, of metaphysical conceptions rising to pure monotheism and nature-worship, taking upon them much sooner than in India the symbolic form of idolatry. At the same time, we are left in suspense as to the order of manifestation— whether polytheistic forms sprang from a monotheistic root,* or from the broad base of natureworship religion rose like a pyramid tapering upward to a single point. But the Egyptian, whether he worshiped the sun as god or as a manifestation of the Deity, whether he worshiped Osiris as the vivifying, fructifying potency in nature, or as a type of the ever-living, ever-progressing soul, did certainly conceive of a supreme divinity, self-originated, invisible, incorruptible, imperishable, the creator and lord of all. The worship was elaborate and imposing, and the priesthood almost absolute over domestic life, and even in affairs of state. "The Egyptians," said Herodotus, "are religious to excess, far beyond any other race of men." But that faith can hardly be called a superstition which projected itself beyond the world and time into the regions of spiritual life, and drew thence motives to the noblest conduct of this life-to justice, honesty, temperance, chastity, truth, reverence, piety, kindness, and beneficence. It seems a complete collapse to pass from the high plane of religious thought and worship in Egypt and in Ethiopia to the fetichism of inner Africa. Yet even in fetichism is found a belief in supernatural power, in fate and mystery, in the spirits of the dead, and in other spirits of good and evil; and in all this the groundwork of a spiritual faith. In attributing to a doll the speech and passions of a human being, the child makes this thing of wax or wood a reflection of the personality which is just developing in its own consciousness; it projects the spiritual beyond its inner self, to be mated with some other * Bunsen held that "all polytheism is based on monotheism."-"Egypt's Place in Universal History," book v., part i., sec. 2, C. spirit which it feels must be. And so, in the infancy of the race, man makes the stone, the block, the material thing that pleases him or does him harm, a spirit to be conversed with, to be propitiated, or to be shunned. The spirit within him, felt though unseen, reaches forth after the spiritual without, which is felt though it can not be seen. Whether belief in a personal God is so general that it may be regarded as native, or at least normal, to the human mind, it does not fall within our present scope to consider. Neither is this the place for a general review of comparative mythology. Our sole aim in analyzing the religions of different races and different periods has been to get at a conception of religion itself at once so fundamental and so comprehensive that, in defining this, we shall fix the place of the religious idea or sentiment in the system of philosophic thought distinct from forms of worship and dogmas of theology. Thus far it is evident that religion is reverence or homage to an object external to the worshiper, which is looked upon as superior in nature, in character, or in power. That this object should be conceived of as a personal being, or as one only God, is not essential; but religion does require an object of faith or worship, a something exterior to the man which he looks upon with a sentiment of admiration, of loyalty, or of awe, which leads him to acts of homage. The virtue which proceeds solely from one's inward impulses, or from self-regulation, with no reference in thought or feeling to any external source or motive of obligation, is morality or goodness, but not piety or religion. But, on the other hand, the lowest form of fetichism, having an object of worship, is called a religion; and, on the other hand, usage allows the term religion to the homage to an ideal, such as nature or humanity in the abstract; since such an ideal as the commanding motive or power over the soul is to all intents personified or deified as the object of worship. This application of the term—perhaps a little overstrained—Mr. Mill has pointed out in the case of Comte, and also of his own father. Speaking of Comte's homage to collective humanity as the "grand être," Mill says: "It may not be consonant to usage to call this a religion; but the term, so applied, has a meaning, and one which is not adequately expressed by any other word. Candid persons of all creeds may be willing to admit that, if a per son has an ideal object, his attachment and sense of duty toward which are able to control and discipline all his other sentiments and propensities, and prescribe to him a rule of life, that person has a religion." He then argues that, in the majesty of his idea of humanity as the object of reverence and love, and in his golden rule of denying self to live for others-“ vivre pour autrui"-Comte "had realized the essential conditions of a religion."* And in describing his father's character and opinions, Mr. Mill contends that many whose belief is far short of deism may be "truly religious," since "they have that which constitutes the principal worth of all religions whatever, an ideal conception of a perfect being, to which they habitually refer as the guide of their conscience." This ideal, though existing purely in thought, is nevertheless projected before the mind as a reality; and the bare conception of such an existence creates an obligation to conform to this as the standard of life. Hence there enter into religion three elements or conditions more or less pronounced— Nature, Man, or God; and the precedence of one or the other of these elements, in the proportion in which they are combined, gives to different religions their distinguishing characteristics. The first of these elements is Nature. Now this term is so used by materialists as to exclude from the categories of science every form of the religious idea; hence a strict definition of nature must precede and prepare our definition of religion. Going back to the Greek conception of nature, we find rò quoikóv sharply distinguished from τὸ ἠθικόν and τὸ λογικόν. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle gives a definition of ovos, or nature, which separates it equally from the sphere of mathematical speculations and from that of spiritual powers: Physics are concerned with things that have a principle of motion in themselves; mathematics self-existent things; and there is another science speculate on permanent but not transcendental and separate from these two, which treats of that which is immutable and transcendental, if indeed there ex ists such a substance, as we shall endeavor to show that there does. This transcendental and permanent substance, if it exists at all, must surely be the sphere of the divine, it must be the first and highest principle. Hence it follows that there are three kinds of speculative science-physics, mathematics, and theology. When he comes to speak of nature more specifically, in his lectures on physics, Aristotle gives this twofold definition: "Nature may be said in one way to be the simplest and most deeptheir own principle of motion and change; in anlying substratum of matter in things possessing other way, it may be called the form and law of |