The question as to what religion is raises the problem as to whence it is. And the questions as to origin are two—how it began and progressed, and what were the moulding factors. The subject has always been found interesting in some of its aspects, and in recent times it has been investigated and debated with unprecedented ardour. Those who deem their religion their most precious possession, and indeed the one thing needful, have naturally desired to make clear to themselves how it came to them, and why it is that others dwell in darkness and under the shadow of death; while even the most detached modern mind must feel some curiosity as to how man first came to make the extraordinary venture of faith and worship, and how he went on to climb the heights that were reached by the Christian saint. It has also been the prevalent opinion that the inquiry into the origins of religion has momentous consequences—that if it could be shown that it was from above it would be authenticated as true, and that if it could be shown to be from beneath it would be utterly discredited. It has indeed become a commonplace in other connections that the manner of origin is irrelevant to the question of value, just as it is agreed to estimate a great man by what he is and has done and not by his ancestry and his upbringing. But this principle cannot be applied in the religious sphere without some quali fication. It is certainly possible that the substance of religion might turn out to be true though in the beginning it was of human devising, and had derived its first materials from the imaginations of fools. On the other hand, origin may stand sponsor for truth. If the divine origin of Christianity can be proved, as the Church has ever confidently believed, this has certainly the effect of establishing the truth of the doctrines and of guaranteeing the efficacy of the saving provisions.

There have been two main types of theory concerning origins, and they may be conveniently distinguished as the theological and the evolutionary. The theological theory has affirmed great beginnings and has ascribed them, directly or indirectly, to the Creator. According to the evolutionary theory religion started as a low form of superstition, which was gradually improved upon, and both genesis and development are fully accounted for by human capacity and faculty and by natural environment. I go on to examine the chief positions of the two schools.

I

1. The view of the origin of religion taken in Christian Theology has been governed by the traditional doctrine of the creation and the original condition of man. This doctrine was founded on the narrative in Genesis, which was the more heartily welcomed as it seemed self-evident that in making man an all-powerful and all-holy God must have wrought a perfect work. And in a world in which all things were made very good, and man was the crown of creation, it also seemed obvious that nothing would be more perfect than the provision that was made for the enlightenment of man in the knowledge of God, and of the conditions of pleasing God. This knowledge, it was usually held, was given through a special revelation, but there was also the alternative view that the Creator equipped man for religion by implanting in him an innate idea of His being and perfections, and by the gift of reason, whereby he was able, before reason was clouded by sin, to understand the invisible things of God from the creation of the world, even His eternal power and Godhead. Modern Theology has generally upheld the tenet of a primitive Monotheism, but has grown doubtful of the primeval revelation; and it has conceived of the first man, not on the lines of the intellectual colossus and the perfect character, but rather on the model of the innocent child who has thoughts about God that can be at once naïvely childlike and profoundly true.

2. The evolutionary theory, as was said, has operated with very different presuppositions. It was assumed that primitive man was in the lowest estate, and that the earliest form of religion, which must have been a purely natural product, was what was to be expected of the groping savage. Lucretius took as his text the saying that the gods were the offspring of fear. In the eighteenth century it was asserted that it was the invention of the ruling class, but clearly it must at least have existed before the priests, and it was improbable, as Hume pointed out, that in every land the masters would be clever enough to devise it, and the peoples stupid enough to be so imposed upon. Hume therefore fell back on the view that it had its source in terror, with which he coupled desire.

‘All available evidence,’ he says, ‘as well as the analogy of the general course of history, leads to the conclusion that the lower polytheism or idolatry was and must have been the first and most ancient religion of mankind.’ ‘The motive must have been one that was suited to the gross apprehension of human nature ‘—which must have been still more gross in the untutored childhood of the race—and he therefore took it to be self-evident that ‘the first ideas of religion arose from a concern with regard to the events of nature, and from the incessant hopes and fears which actuate the human mind.’1

In the post-Darwinian period the problem was attacked afresh in the assurance that not only was the fact of human evolution established beyond doubt, but that the method was at last understood. It was taken for granted that at the outset man was only at one remove from the brutes, and that religion must have had the same lowly beginnings as man himself. In the first phase it was held that the rudimentary form of religion was an offshoot from the animistic system of thought. According to Tylor, man reasoned from the experiences of the dream and the swoon to the existence of a soul which was separable from the body and survived death, and he went on to fill his world with a multitude of other spirits fashioned on the same model.

‘It was no spontaneous fancy,’ he observes, ‘but the reasonable inference that effects are due to causes which led the rude men of old days to people with such ethereal phantoms their own homes and haunts, and the vast earth and sky beyond.’2 And a practical application of the theological doctrine was made in worship. ‘The belief that these spirits controlled events, and that they received pleasure and displeasure from human actions, led naturally and indeed inevitably to active reverence and propitiation.’3 The theory was given a more precise turn by Herbert Spencer, who fastened on the disembodied spirit or ghost as the object which supplied man with his first creed, and suggested the rudiments of a cult. ‘It is emphatically true,’ he says, ‘that the first traceable conception of a supernatural being is the conception of a ghost, and from the ghost, once uniformly conceived, have arisen the variously conceived supernatural beings. We thus reach the conclusion that ancestor-worship is the root of every religion.’4

While the animistic doctrine was widely accepted in its Spencerian form as an established scientific result, and was also confidently popularised as a means of deliverance from the fear of God, in the recent decades there has been a growing opinion either that it went too far in its debasement of primitive piety, or that it did not go far enough. The opposition was represented in the first instance by Max Müller, who contended that man possessed a natural disposition to religion, and the equipment of ‘a mental faculty ‘by which he was constrained to recognise the Infinite in the finite; that in the case at least of the early Aryans religions began with a perception of the Infinite in the mighty objects of the starry firmament and of the scenery of earth; and that ‘possibly other peoples also may have started from the same beginnings and passed through the same vicissitudes.’5 In the next phase it was pointed out that the most backward tribes, notably the Australian aborigines, have been under the influence of totemistic rather than of animistic ideas; and it seemed necessary, in accordance with the canon that we have our clearest glimpse of the first man in the lowest savage, to assign the priority to Totemism. The former prevalence and importance of Totemism were divined by M’Lennan, were traced by Robertson Smith in the early Semitic field, and were illustrated by the masses of material that were collected and commented on by Frazer. By Jevons and others it was carried back to primitive man.

‘All external objects,’ says Jevons, ‘were conceived by him as personal, and he identified now one and now another with the will with which his heart prompted him to seek communion Animals were the first of the external objects which came to be worshipped, and for a long time he continued to have only one object of worship, the totem or tribal god.’6

The claims of the totem, however, as of the ghost before it, were insecure, as it had to make way for a humbler idol if such could be discovered. Fetishism did not serve the purpose, as it seemed obvious that the worship of stocks and stones must have been secondary to belief in something else, but this objection did not apply to the dealings of savage man with the uncanny force of mana, which otherwise satisfied the conditions. There has, accordingly, been a growing tendency to see in mana the primeval stuff out of which the gods were fashioned, and in the attempts to manipulate it the first tentative approaches to the divine. Mr. Marett is cited as the author of the ‘pre-animistic theory,’ but he has been more concerned to show that Manism is sub-animistic and an independent growth, and he has expressed himself very cautiously on the point of priority.

‘It would be untrue,’ he says, ‘to deny that the term “pre-animistic” was used by me designedly and with a chronological reference. What I would not be prepared to lay down dogmatically or even provisionally is merely that there was a pre-animistic era in the history of religion, when animism was not, and nevertheless religion of a kind existed. For all I know, some sort of animism in Tylor’s sense of the word was a primary condition of the most primitive religion of mankind. But I believe that there were other conditions no less primary. Moreover, I hold that it can be shown conclusively that, in some cases, animistic interpretations have been superimposed on what previously bore a non-animistic sense.’7

It has to be added that the old and the new theories, sharply contrasted as they are, have been found capable of adjustment at some points. The theologian had a field in which he could accept the evolutionist’s statement of the question, and make use of his method. For Theology had had to deal with the problem of the origin of heathen religion; and the conditions of this problem were much the same as those which were assumed by Hume and Spencer, since it was held that the state of original righteousness was followed by a Fall which brought about the corruption and even the brutalisation of the general mass of mankind. The possibility of such a combination was shown by Hobbes. Hobbes may not indeed be ranked as a Christian thinker, but he at least left unquestioned the Christian doctrines of human origins and of the history of true religion, and in going on to discuss the rise of false religion he employed the naturalistic method, and in fact made a striking anticipation of the animistic theory of the Darwinian era.

‘In these four things,’ he says,’ opinion of ghosts, ignorance of second causes, devotion towards what men fear, and taking of things casual for prognostics, consisteth the natural seed of religion. And for the matter or substance of the invisible agents so fancied, they could not by natural cogitation fall upon any other conceit, but that it was the same with that of the soul of man; and that the soul of man was of the same substance as that which appeareth in a dream to one that sleepeth; or in a looking-glass to one that is awake, which men, not knowing that such apparitions are nothing else but creatures of the fancy, think to be real and external substances, and therefore call them ghosts.’8

Again, from the anthropological side there has been one notable instance of a reversion to the theological tradition. It was pointed out by Andrew Lang that the lowest tribes of savages, though their workaday religion may consist in the traffic with ghosts and demons, or with sacred animals, usually recognise in the background a Supreme Being who does the works of the Maker and Ruler, and who has moral qualities and supports a moral order. And he contended with much force that it was unworthy of Science, and barely honest, to make use of the savage so long as he supported a preconceived opinion, and to drop him when his evidence was unfavourable.

‘I do not pretend to know,’ he observes, ‘how the lowest savages evolved the theory of a God who reads the heart and makes for righteousness. It is as easy, almost, for one to believe that they were not left without a witness as to believe that this God of theirs was evolved out of the maleficent ghost of a dirty, mischievous medicine-man. There is much more justification than is commonly admitted for regarding the bulk of savage religion as degenerate or corrupted from its own highest elements.’9

3. It must be admitted that Theology has no direct knowledge of the original condition of mankind. The idea of Adam was welcome to the apologetic mind which felt that God must be exonerated from any responsibility for the sin and misery that are the scandal of our earth; and which essayed this by teaching that, while man had been made perfect, he abused the freedom with which he had been endowed, and so brought grievous and multiplying ills upon himself. And this doctrine has maintained its ground, at least in principle, as an intelligible and tenable solution of the problem of the rise of moral evil among mankind. It is nevertheless possible that God did not order things as the apologist conceives He ought to have done, and that He chose another method for bringing man into being and launching him on his career of mingled tragedy and glory. The truth that mm is made in the image of God is on a quite different footing from the speculation as to the manner in which he attained this dignity.

And if Theology may not dogmatise about the origin of religion when the original condition of the race is obscure, no more is it permissible in the name of Science. The anthropological theories of the genesis of religion are in fact precarious inferences from very dubious premises. There are no firsthand sources of information on the subject, and the most that can be offered is a speculation based on the conception that may be formed of the primitive condition of the human race, of the relevant propensities and principles of human nature, and of the value of Anthropology for the elucidation of the subject. And on each of these heads there is room for wide differences of opinion. Even when mankind is embraced within the general scheme of evolution, the picture of the original condition may be painted very differently according as the chief motive is discovered in the animal inheritance or in the specifically human endowment. Again, students of human nature are far from agreed as to the relevant principles, while it is more than doubtful if Psychology has yet done full justice to the spiritual powers and capacities which enter into the religious life. And finally, it is a question whether we may not learn more about the origin of religion by studying it at its highest level than by studying it at its lowest.

What seems to me a probable account of the beginnings of religions may be indicated. The human race, I must think, was a gradual creation. It has passed through stages similar to those of the individual who in the womb gradually developed human features, and thereafter was born into the world as an infant weighted with a mass of animal propensities, and who went on to attain the status of a rational and moral being with the promise and potency of perfection. And as in the development of the individual there is a point at which a member of our race, though his body evolved after the manner of the animals, came into possession of the higher qualities that stamp him as a human being, so was there a point at which the human species, whatever the extent of its debt to animal progenitors, found itself on the human plane, equipped with reason and conscience, and bearing the image of the Highest. The devout mind has found it easy to believe that in creating man God made use of preexistent stuff and fashioned him out of the dust of the ground, and the substitution for dust of an animal species does not affect the essential point of the biblical narrative, which is that man now bears the image of God. Again, even as when everything is known which Science has to tell of the conception and the embryonic growth of the individual, it is a tenable view that an additional power came into play to produce the new personality, so may it be held that a creative act, which outwardly had the aspect of progress per saltum, brought our species into being in its distinctively human character.

The problem, then, is how a species which had become human through the possession of the spiritual mode of being came to form religious ideas, and to practise religious observances. The determining factor, it seems to me, must have been the tendency, traceable throughout the history of the race, which is manifested in a yearning for God and an impulsion towards God. It is possible that the power of this instinct was felt in peculiar strength in the period when reason was less used and trusted than in later ages; or it may be that there was a point at which it was greatly intensified, when it stirred to its depths the life of the early population of the planet after the fashion of a tumultuous revival. On the theoretical side the instinct would involve, not indeed as much Theology as has been associated with the innate idea, but at least a conviction of the reality of the higher Being to which man felt himself drawn, and the assurance that in union with this Being the best would be found and enjoyed. And even as it is the way of man to dream of earthly happiness and to seek it in love or wealth or power or fame, so could our first forefathers dream of God, and think to discern Him either when they looked within or when they looked without, and if without, when they pondered the impressive objects whether of animate or inanimate nature. It may be that as a matter of history there were several independent beginnings corresponding to fundamental varieties of spiritual taste, insight and judgment. But It may also be that the venture of faith which was the first in time, and which served as the precedent and point of departure for other ventures, was made by a leader who had a sense of the dawning greatness of their human species, who had seen nothing so worthy of reverence as men that were wise and strong and good, and who conceived of the Divine Being as existing after the likeness of their best. In the earliest period the human race doubtless produced some extraordinary individuals; and while the primitive representative of talent and genius must have been grievously fettered by the poverty of language, he had at his disposal the organising categories of thought; and it must have been quite within his powers, as was previously observed, to conceive of a highest Being who had made the world in which he lived, and who did the works of a ruler, a protector and a benefactor. And as the modern mother is able to impart the elements of a true Monotheism even to babes, there is no reason why, ever since man was able to speak as well as to think, the early sage should not have been able to communicate to his fellows the simple substance of the same creed. It might also be that the oldest human society was not wholly dependent for enlightenment upon the insight of the primordial sage and the witness of its own spirit. An additional avenue was suggested by Tennyson:

Star to star vibrates light, may soul to soul

Strike through a finer medium of its own?

The Psychology of the future will perhaps accept as established the telepathic transmission of thought; and in that event there may be a vogue for the theory that, when the human race acquired its specific characters, it became accessible to spiritual influences that radiated from the kindred communities of spiritual beings that are naturally supposed to exist in other habitable domains of the wider universe. And if these, as may be thought likely, are at one in believing is God, it would be plausibly maintained that a dim consciousness of this cosmic faith emerged in the primitive human mind, and conveyed to it some illumination and guidance. And if this be a real possibility in a spiritual universe, much more is it credible to those who believe in a God in whom we live, and move and have our being, that primitive man felt the pressure of the divine spirit on his finite spirit, was haunted by the sense of His presence, enjoyed some inspiration in his thinking about divine things, and also received some inward attestation of such elements of truth as he had been enabled to apprehend.

II

In the treatment of the development of religion the two schools have also gone different ways. They have differently represented the general trend of religious history, and while one has confidently affirmed, the other has resolutely denied, the operation of supernatural factors in the historical process.

1. The traditional version of the course of religious history was in harmony with our observation that the habitual route of the religious mind is by way of pessimism to optimism. The natural development was depicted in the darkest colours, The original deposit of truth, it was held, was corrupted and lost; and as men were also deaf to the voice of God speaking through His works, they fell away to the worship of the creature in place of the Creator, and even bowed down before the meanest of creatures and the works of their own hands. This apostasy had for its consequence an ever-deepening moral degradation, while in turn the wickedness aggravated the spiritual blindness. In the patristic period it was also held that the heathen religion had been instituted by demons, and that the deities of the popular faith were devils who had got themselves accepted as Gods. While, however, the human race in its main body pursued its course towards darkness and destruction, there was, it was held, a movement which was guided and sustained by a special revelation and a special training. This dispensation was begun in a patriarchal line, was carried forward in the education of the chosen people, and in the fulness of time reached its consummation in the Incarnation of God in Christ, and in the saving provisions of the gospel of regeneration, sanctification, and eternal life. The sublime conclusion of this scheme of thought, now, is the abiding conviction of the Christian Church, and Philosophy has generally endorsed it in its own way, but the pessimistic prologue did injustice to the spiritual aspirations and achievements of pre-Christian heathendom. It is true that the movements of the religious world have been peculiarly subject to a law of degeneration that there are inveterate tendencies operative in human nature which assiduously work for the misunderstanding and corruption of great truths, and for the lowering and the vulgarisation of moral ideals, and that this downward trend has been marked in the after-history of every spiritual movement that has started from great beginnings; but it is not open to question that in the course of the ethnic development a series of new departures took place in which the human spirit was lifted to much higher levels than those from which it had declined in its times of decadence. In the great ethnic religions there is much which must be set down to the theoretic reason in a high-souled endeavour to comprehend and illuminate the scheme of existence. And it is even more obvious that the commanding religious figures were ambassadors of the practical reason; and that, enjoying at the least the inspiration of conscience, they elevated the moral ideal, bound up piety with virtue, and conceived it to be a vital part of their mission to assert the supremacy of the moral law over the promptings of the animal nature and the dictates of worldly custom. In view of these circumstances it seems clear that Theology ought not to have been fettered by the Pauline account of the plight of our sin-bound and sin-stained race that was reached in the darkest hour, but should have remembered the more sympathetic estimate which he gave on Mars Hill, of the aspiration and striving of the religious spirit, and above all should have made an application of the Johannine conception of the Logos which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. And in that case it could have advanced on the teaching of Clement and Origen, when it would have associated the higher ethnic faiths with Greek Philosophy as having made a positive contribution to the praeparatio evangelica.

2. The evolutionary treatment unified the history of religion by exhibiting it as a process in which the lower form of creed and cult had preceded, and evolved into, the higher form, and which on the whole was a progressive movement the temporal succession of the stages corresponding generally to the ascending scale of spiritual and moral values. At the same time the genetic treatment was simplified by tracing every stage of the process to the operation of purely natural causes. There have, however, been considerable variations in the working out of the scheme. Very different versions have been given of the family-tree of the religions; and while in the earlier period these were published with very great confidence, there is a growing opinion that it is a difficult if not an impossible task, and that several family-trees would need to be constructed. There have also been very different estimates of the moulding and guiding forces. According to one view, religion evolved out of a spiritual germ; according to another, it was produced out of nonreligious elements by a kind of spontaneous generation. By one account man has been throughout in quest of God, by another he has been seeking a point of view which would serve for his better adaptation to a difficult environment. Some have laid stress on irrational impulses, others on the guidance of reason, and a third opinion has been that the movement began and was carried forward by unreason, but that it happily brought forth the fruits of wisdom. The work of Tiele is the most notable attempt that has been made to control and elucidate the whole material from the scientific standpoint, and I reproduce the salient features of his scheme with special reference to the treatment of the genetic problem that is developed in the noble book entitled The Elements of the Science of Religion.

Tiele constructed an elaborate morphological classification of religions, in which he distributed them into the two classes of nature-religions and ethical religions. In the class of the natural religions the ascending series was animistic Polydaemonism, therianthropic Polytheism, and anthropomorphic Polytheism. The ethical religions he arranged in the two classes of national and universal—the national being also described as nomistic from their association with a fixed code of faith and morals, while the universal were held to be less bound, and to operate with a set of spiritual and moral principles. The genealogical classification, he observes, has only been worked out for some parts of the field, but he conceived that it corresponded generally with the morphological scheme, and that the movement had been from Animism through Polytheism to the spiritual and ethical heights of the universal religions. The causal explanation given of the evolution of religion is briefly as follows:

‘When we speak of development,’ he says, ‘we imply that the object undergoing development is a unity—that the changes we observe are not like those that proceed from the caprices of tickle man, as the clothes we wear change with the freaks of fashion; that the oak already exists potentially in the acorn, and the man in the child. “Development is,” to quote an American scholar, “a continuous progressive change according to certain laws and by means of resident forces.” In the second place, we imply that each phase of the evolution has its value, importance and right of existence, and that it is necessary to give birth to a higher phase, and continues to act in that higher phase.’10

The essential factors by which the development was initiated and furthered were the immanent forces of the human constitution, among which he gave prominence to a specifically religious principle:

‘There was an instinct or an innate, original and unconscious from of thought.’ ‘It was not childish dreams that gave rise to that faith which has proved so stupendous a power in the world’s history; it was man’s original, unconscious, innate sense of infinity that gave rise to his first stammering utterances of that sense, and to all his beautiful dreams of the past and of the future.’11

Of the utmost importance, also, was the cooperation of the powers and capacities of man’s intellectual and moral nature. There was, however, a need of something additional to stimulate the productive forces and to carry on the progressive movement. The favouring conditions are specified in a series of laws which he formulated, and which may be regarded as a parallel to the mechanism of biological evolution. The first is the law of the unity of the human mind, and is to the effect that every advance that was made in civilised achievement, especially in knowledge and in morality, tended to raise religion to a higher plane. The second is the law of progress through interaction. ‘All development,’ it is said,’ results from the stimulus given to self-consciousness by contact with a different stage of development whether higher or lower, and the religion that will attain the highest development is that which is most alive to the genuinely religious elements in other forms.’ The third is the law of the influence of great personalities. These are, indeed, the heirs of the ages and the children of their time. But ‘their creative spirit gives, as it were, voice and form to what had hitherto been powerless, though potentially present in the bosoms of others. It is they who awaken this life, who create this form; they are the sun without whose fostering beams the germs would die and the slumbering life would never awake.’12

The factors and the laws adduced by Tiele undoubtedly go some way to account for the rise and progress of religion. In affirming the existence of a spiritual faculty as an element of the human constitution he gives a probable explanation of the fact that such a thing as religion came into existence and has persistently held its ground. Undoubtedly also the upward movement was promoted by the influences which he specifies. If the religious instinct disposed men to seek their good in union with the best of beings, the higher that they rose in the moral scale the more worthily would they think of the nature of their salvation and of the God on whom they were dependent. It is, however, an equally well-founded observation that the moral standard has repeatedly been raised, and the moral life of the peoples enriched, as the consequence of the appearance of a better religion. Next, there is no doubt that a religion has sometimes been improved by coming into contact with other faiths, but the importance of this law may be thought to be exaggerated in view of the fact that Hebrew Prophetism developed in circles which regarded the heathen faiths with loathing or contempt, and that Christianity came into existence among a people that was under the sway of Judaistic rigour and exclusiveness. The law of the influence of the great personality is of the highest importance. Probably each of the advances that were made on the lower levels had a prophet and apostles, and each of the ethical and universal religions clearly began in the experience and the teachings of an individual founder. But if the great personality explains the epoch-making advances in the spiritual life of mankind, it certainly does not explain Itself. ‘There always remains something,’ as Tiele admits, ‘which cannot be accounted for by heredity and environment,’ and he adds that ‘this is the chiefest thing of all.’ And to Tiele’s list have to be added two other laws which likewise point to mystery and higher causality. One might be called the law of spiritual vivification. An extraordinary intensification of the spiritual life has occurred from age to age in the history of different peoples or groups of peoples; and this quickening has been, equally with the appearance of the prophetic instrument, the condition of the planting, the rapid expansion, and the reformation of the great faiths which have successfully contended for the spiritual allegiance of mankind. This vivification seems in some periods even to have swept across continents, as in the middle centuries of the first millennium before our era; and in the history of the Christian Church it was exemplified in the Pentecostal experience of the primitive age, in the medieval revivals, and in the religious zeal which, accompanied the Reformation, and which so deeply coloured the history of England and Scotland in the seventeenth century. And in these racial experiences, as in the individual parallel, the law has been as expressed by Matthew Arnold:

We cannot kindle when we will

The fire that in the heart resides,

The spirit bloweth and is still,

In mystery our soul abides.

To the influence of great individuals has to be added the influence of great events. The decisive stages in the spiritual history of mankind have been bound up with new things which occurred in history, and which gave rise to exalted beliefs and fresh hopes. The events which took place in the history of Israel supplied the prophets with the chief elements of their knowledge of God, and it was probably no accident, but an illustration of the principle that there is light in the way of the Cross, that in the period which ranks as the golden age of prophecy the experience of the chosen people was a long-drawn agony, And Christianity was largely due to new things that happened in the world. It was not only because of what Jesus was, but because He died upon the Cross, and after His death was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve, and of many brethren at once, that Christianity developed its special doctrines, and that it took the commanding place it has won in the spiritual world.

Inasmuch as religion has grown up in a terrestrial environment, and under human conditions, undoubtedly much can be explained on the same principles as other historical movements and events. The work that has been done in the genetic studies of Tiele and others is of value, and more may be expected if it should come to be agreed that there is such a thing as a Science of History, and if more progress should be made in the observation of the uniformities and sequences, and in appraising the influence of environment, race, economic needs, and other factors. But what seems to me certain is that a Science of Religion can only give at the best a fragmentary view of a historical process which has been penetrated by forces, and governed by laws, of the kind that empirical Science does not permit itself to recognise. The Science of Religion breaks in a most vital particular with the movement which it undertakes to explain. For the scientific assumption is that at no stage of history has the power that is operative in the universe done anything for man except to guarantee him the use of his natural endowment of spiritual capacity, and of rational and moral powers, while it is the most deep-seated of religious convictions that man as we know him, in his natural condition, is dependent on the help of God for the attainment of his true well-being, and that this includes the possession of enlightenment and of moral power. In religion man has sought victory over the world through union with the God who is mightier than the world, while at the scientific standpoint the world may be thought to be given the lordship over God. When this doctrine arose within the Church under the name of Pelagianism it was cast out as a pestilent heresy which would rob a distressful world of the sorely-needed gospel of divine initiative and saving grace; and it cannot be expected that it should be acceptable in the still more drastic form in which it is now pressed upon it from without, even though this be done in the august name of Science.

It seems quite unwarranted to assume that no factors have entered into the relations of man with God other than those found in his relations with the world and his finite fellow-creatures. That it should have been so is extremely unlikely if it be that in religion man has really had to do with the living God, and not merely with the ideas and the expectations which he has formed concerning God, with the service which he has prayed Him to accept at his hands. At the least, communion with God must involve as much as in the parallel cases, Every form of personal union with which we are acquainted—notably friendship and the estate of marriage—involves the participation of the two members in a common life, and a contribution from two sides towards the maintenance and enrichment of the fellowship; but if it is to be held that in the religious union God has been otiose, and that everything has been initiated from the human side, the religious relationship is made to appear the poorest because the most one-sided and most barren of this whole class of experiences. Rather might it be taken for granted by all who believe religion to be a reality that God is the all-important member of the sacred association, and that there has been a contribution from the divine side which makes the religious relationship immeasurably to surpass, both in content and in promise, the most intimate and enriching form of human union. And if, as in the earthly parallels, the divine initiative and the divine benefits be a reality, then the attempts to explain the spiritual history of mankind solely in terms of human aspiration and endeavour must be on the whole a travesty and not an explanation. It is as if one should give a description of the life of a family in which the ideas and the behaviour of the children filled the whole picture, and the purposes and the action of the parents were dismissed as negligible. And there is more than antecedent probability on which to found. When we trace the course of religious history so far as it is known, and when we study its golden ages, and especially the origins and the achievement of Christianity, there is a very considerable body of evidence to justify the belief that the living God took to do with the historical process. There are many things in it which are very inadequately explained by pointing to the reflex action of a progressive civilisation, the collision of ideas and ideals, and the casual appearance of the great man, and which fit in much better with the religious view that the movement was inspired, or at least guided and controlled, by a divine intelligence that worked within it and through it in the pursuit of spiritual and moral ends. The Hebrew prophets made this assumption, which they used as the key to the interpretation of the extraordinary experiences of their people; and the same principle is fundamental in the most influential system of religious philosophy that has circulated in the Church and the world—that, viz., which is set forth in the epistles of St. Paul. And the apostle’s interpretation may be briefly outlined.

3. St. Paul, who was at home in two religions, and who also had a knowledge of various forms of heathenism, had a philosophical delight in wide views, and also much of the modern passion for causal explanations, and he had much to teach in his own language about the factors and the laws of religious development. Among the factors he gave the preeminent place to God, and to the operations of His power, His wisdom and His goodness. He also made some generalisations in regard to the ways of God which might be considered as laws that direct the divine intelligence, and govern the divine will, in the exercise of justice and mercy. According to the apostle the primary factors in religions history were to be found on the one hand in the reign of sin and the punishment which follows in its train, on the other in the progressive revelation of truth and grace whereby God sought to deliver mankind from its guilt and its thraldom. In coping with sin there had been, first, a signal manifestation of the divine power. One of Paul’s generalisations was that the greatest things in religious history have been accomplished by the humblest means; and the reason, he conceived, was that it might be made manifest that they were God’s doing, and that He might be exalted in the earth. ‘God chose the foolish things of the world, that He might put to shame them that are wise; and God chose the weak things of the world, that He might put to shame the things that are strong; and the base things of the world, and the things that are despised, did God choose, yea and the things that are not, that He might bring to nought the things that are: that no flesh should glory before God’ (1 Cor. i. 27–29). The mystery of the religious genius for which Tiele has no explanation was easily explained: God needed instruments for His work, and He raised them up when they were needed, and girded them by His power (Gal. i. 15, 16). But chiefly was the power of God made manifest in the spiritual realm in the person and the work of Christ—‘to them that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God’ (1 Cor. i. 23, 24). And he found the same power revealed in extraordinary impressiveness in the dispensation of the Spirit, in which it is granted to the believer to be strengthened with might by His Spirit in the inward man (Eph. iii. 16), and even to do all things through Christ which strengtheneth him. Next, the apostle found in history striking evidences of a divine wisdom. ‘O the depth of the riches,’ he cries, ‘both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God!’ (Rom. xi. 33). There were indeed unsearchable depths, and he confessed that he only knew in part, but it seemed to him that the general scope and plan of the divine dealings bore the clear impress of a supreme intelligence. For in dealing with the most intractable material the most splendid results had been achieved by the use of means which man would have expected to be utterly futile. This he found exemplified in the divine government of the world, in which the contrary aims and strivings of the peoples had been overruled, and their doings and sufferings had been made to serve as a preparation for the Kingdom of God (Gal. iv. 3, 4). The other and chiefest example was what might be called the principle of the scheme of salvation, according to which God purposed to subdue mankind unto Himself, while yet He did not rely on the force which is at the disposal of omnipotence, but made trial of what could be achieved in response to self-sacrificing love and unmerited favour. And it was seen that the wisdom of God was greater than the wisdom of man when the crucified Christ was given a name that is above every name—‘that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father’ (Phil. ii. 9–11). The apostle, again, found enough in the tragical history of the race to show that its divine Governor has ruled in righteousness and has visited upon sin its appropriate penalties, whereof the worst is that wickedness is punished by multiplying, and by coming to a head in utter spiritual impotence and blindness. But the crowning conclusion and certitude was that God had been revealed in His dealings with sinners of mankind as the Being whose nature and whose name is love. The chief manifestations of the divine that he found were these—the forbearance that had been shown in delaying the full punishment merited by sin (Rom. iii. 25); the timing of deliverance for the hour when the world had touched the lowest depths of sin and misery; above all, the unspeakable gift of Jesus Christ (Rom. v. 8), and the infusion of the very life of God Himself into the life of humanity in the economy of the Holy Ghost (Rom. v. 5; Eph. i. 13–14). And in his individual experience St. Paul saw a revelation of the same God through similar dealings. He knew that God was love because of what He had wrought when He revealed His Son in him; while as regards the happenings of his outward life he saw in many the hand of the God of a kindly providence, and touching the afflictions of which his life was full there was a sufficient theodicy in the assurance that ‘to them that love God all things work together for good’ (Rom. viii. 28). ‘In all these things we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (Rom. viii. 37–39).

The theological interpretation can be harmonised to a certain extent with the scientific interpretation. Its essential principle is that God has done things, and still does them, and it is quite compatible with this that things should be done in a providential as well as in a miraculous way. It is a common opinion that if it be shown that an event was due to natural causes it is thereby shown that God had no hand in it; but as we ourselves act in and through the forces and the laws of nature, and at the same time are of opinion that we carry out plans and perform acts of which our mind is the true cause, it is not evident why it should be thought impossible for God to do the same. It is quite a credible as well as an intelligible view that there are natural laws which governed the developments of the history of Israel, and that God embraced these in His providential government and employed them as means for the accomplishment of His purposes of judgment and mercy. It is therefore easy for Theology, if it does not forget its own doctrine of Providence, to accept assured results in the way of natural causation as only throwing fresh light on the instrumentality of the works of God. On the other hand, it seems to me that when it is affirmed, not only that the causes which are called natural have played a large part in the history of religion, but that they have been the only causes, a legitimate and useful method is supplemented by an unfounded dogma. It is no casual impression, but has been the deep-seated conviction of the Christian Church in all ages, that the mind and the arm of God were revealed in sacred history. The grace of God is the most probable explanation of the fact that, notwithstanding the pressure of the law of degeneration, which is one of the best established in this sphere, at intermittent periods, and usually when the situation was at its worst, there has taken place a quickening which raised the spiritual life of a nation or a generation to a higher plane, and enriched it with more splendid visions and with fresh spiritual powers. Especially may it be held with a good intellectual conscience that the hand of a wonderworking God was revealed in the structures of Hebrew Prophetism and of primitive Christianity which arose in startling and sublime contrast to the anarchical superstitions and the licensed immoralities of the environing realms of heathenism. And above all, remembering Jesus Christ one need not be ashamed to confess to the belief that more than human nature and natural law has gone to the making and the perfecting of religion.

It was a great interpretation of great things which was given by St. Paul when he traced in the spiritual history of our race a revelation of the power, the wisdom, the righteousness and the goodness of a personal God. But in our age it has had to reckon with two strong objections. One is that everything can be explained in other ways, and that the action of God is a superfluous hypothesis. On this I have already touched, and would only add that the same reasons which are given for setting God aside have convinced some very able men that the causal efficiency of the mind of the objector is also a superfluous hypothesis—the speech or writing by which he delivers himself of his opinion being sufficiently accounted for by the reactions of his bodily organism to a particular physical stimulus. The fact is that the evidence for the proposition that God has carried out rational and ethical purposes in history is the same in kind as that which convinces ordinary people that human beings other than themselves exist, and which leads them to think that the wisdom and the goodness of a parent or a friend are the true causes of the behaviour towards themselves which emanates from various systems of phenomena with which they have relations.

The second objection, which carries much weight with other minds, is that the notion of God carrying out special purposes in the way described is anthropomorphic, and unworthy of God. God may do everything, or He may do nothing, but at least He may not be thought of as doing anything in particular—as an individual among individuals who forms plans and uses means like theirs. And this is an attitude of which none will speak lightly who has endeavoured to realise the awfulness of God, and the import of the attributes of infinitude. Between the Creator and the creature there is a great gulf fixed; and as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are His ways higher than our ways, and His thoughts than our thoughts. But just for the reason that His ways are not our ways, it may well be that we limit Him when we think to exalt Him. The charge of anthropomorphism may be retorted, and I think justly, on the critic of the ordinary religious standpoint. For it would seem that he is under the prepossession that, just as it is impossible for a king who has the business of a kingdom on his mind to concern himself with the affairs of all his individual subjects, so is it impossible that the Infinite Being who is the ground of the universe, and who upholds the cosmic order throughout innumerable worlds, should entertain special purposes bearing on the history of the nations of the earth, and the life of their component units. But surely it is at least a sublime possibility that God, tor the very reason that He is the God of infinite perfection, is and does what from the human point of view seems an incongruity if not a contradiction—that while bearing the burden of the illimitable universe, He is also present to every part of it in the plenitude of His attributes, ministers to each according to its needs or with reference to its end, and even condescends to take part in the life of the world in the character of an individual dealing with other individuals. If this be so—and I believe that it is an astounding religious paradox which is also a master-truth—it may be believed that Paul was not mistaken when he traced the doings of a purposing and acting God in the history of a race of beings bearing the divine image, and when he taught—in this following his Master—that even the individual is the object of the providential dispensations as well as of the grace of a Heavenly Father.

• 1.

  Natural History of Religion: Works, ed. Green and Grose, 1907, vol. ii. p. 308.

• 2.

  Primitive Culture, ⁴, 1903, ii. p. 109.

• 3.

  Ibid., i. p. 427.

• 4.

  The Principles of Sociology, ³, 1885, i. PP. 280 ff.

• 5.

  Hibbert Lectures on The Origin of Religion, 1881.

• 6.

  Introduction to the History of Religion, 1896, p. 411.

• 7.

  The Threshold of Religion,² 1914, Preface.

• 8.

  The Leviathan, pt. I. ch. xii.

• 9.

  The Making of Religion,², 1890, p. 170, ix.–xii.

• 10.

  The Science of Religion, 1897, p. 30.

• 11.

  Op. cit., p. 30.

• 12.

  Op. cit., I. chaps, viii., ix.