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Will it be said that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are past and gone, and their names mean nothing now? Oh! do not their types remain? If the living Abrahams be few, can that be said of the living Isaacs and Jacobs? Are they not to be numbered by myriads and millions, and that not in the Hebrew Israel, but in the larger Israel of America and mankind? Can we recognize no likeness to anything we see? Does no Nathan say to any living David: “Thou art the man"?

Let us enter into this larger thought. The more deeply we do so, the more shall we revere and love that God who, though high above the highest, despises and overlooks none, and seeks and saves even the lowest.

F. FROTHINGHAM.

THE RELIGIOUS GENIUS OF THE RACES.

I.

In the study of the religions of the world, we find many interesting contrasts; but perhaps none more striking than that between the religious ideas that have come down to us in the Zend-Avesta and those that have been disclosed to us in the cuneiform inscriptions, which have been excavated from the mounds where once flourished the great cities of Media and Assyria. In the Zend-Avesta, we find the most intense and vigorous moral tone and a faith almost monotheistic. In the cuneiform inscriptions, on the other hand, we see a gross polytheism, full of magic ceremonies and worship of idols; and, what is worse, we find human sacrifices and impure rites to have been common occurrences. What is the source of this difference? The physical features of Western Persia supply nothing adequate to explain the diversity; and the social conditions of the Iranians were not radically different from those of the people of Akkad and Assyria,- certainly not superior. The leadership in civilization was in fact with the latter; and, as far as that availed, we should expect to find their religion the more elevated. The explanation of these diverse relig

ious tendencies must be sought in other sources than those supplied by physical environment or social, political, or moral conditions.

Again, for another, though converse illustration, look at the traits that characterize the religions of the various aboriginal tribes of our American continent. What striking similarity among them, what distinctive family features, and yet what great variety of climate, what differences in fertility of soil and grade of barbarism or semi-civilization in the different parts of North and South America! What else can explain this marked resemblance between the faiths of these many widely separated tribes than the fact which most ethnologists recognize, that they all belong to a single, well-defined race.

The evolution of religion cannot then be explained merely by those external physical and social influences, in which some writers rest.

It is necessary to add to the differentiating factors of the religious evolution such factors as will explain these phenomena we have noticed. They are not to be found by looking outwardly, about man. Their seat is within, in the native faculty or disposition with which each race or nation or individual comes to the experiences of life. We may call them, then, the organic or internal variables.

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Foremost is that of race. Each great division into which the ethnologists divide the human family - the black, brown, red, yellow, and white races have specific intellectual and emotional traits. Each has, therefore, a distinct religious genius. And, among the various minor ethnological divisions, the various nations are often distinguished by characteristic religious tendencies.

"The daughter of a crab," says the African proverb, "does not give birth to a bird." Or, as the Brahman says, more poetically, "The stroke written on the forehead by Vishnu, Brahma, Siva, or any other of the gods, can never be washed out."

So it is with these inherited religious tendencies. Though scientific theory would derive these originally from physical,

social, or political conditions, yet, when once ingrained in the national constitution, they are transmitted and increased from generation to generation, and are independent of time, place, or social gradation. They have become, henceforth, forces, having their own unmistakable influence, and not further analyzable. Instead of fading out before civilization, their peculiarities seem to be brought forth more prominently by it.

The great races into which the ethnologists divide mankind are five in number: 1. The black, or African; 2. the brown, or Australoid; 3. the red, or that of the American Indians; 4. the yellow, or Mongoloid; 5. the white, or Mediterranean, with its three great branches,— the Hamites, the Semites, and Aryans.

Now, if we take the first three of these, the black, the brown, and the red,-and compare them with the two latter, we see marked differences. The first three have probably been as long resident on the earth as the two latter. They have occupied climates as favorable for civilization as the latter, but they have never developed any high civilization. The best that they have done is to reach in the neighborhood of Lake Tschad in Africa, and in some of the favored Pacific islands, the higher levels of barbarism; and, in Mexico and Central America and Peru, a semi-civilization that attained to picture-writing, but not to alphabetic records.

Deficient, therefore, as it would seem, in the higher mental faculties necessary for the development of civilization, it is not strange that they should not have developed religion to any high range. The general characteristic of the religion of these races is poly-spiritism, or to use the term that Tylor has introduced animism; i.e., belief in the existence of numberless spirits about man, able to move freely through earth and air, and to make themselves visible to man, either of their own accord or when summoned by spells, and to whom are due all strange phenomena that strike the eye. The spirits are also thought to take up their abode, either temporarily or permanently, in some object, whether living or lifeless, it matters not; and this

object, as endowed with higher power, is then worshipped or employed to protect individuals or communities. It becomes, that is, a fetich-god.

Of these numberless spirits, it is only the powerful — those on which man feels himself dependent, and before which he stands in awe - that acquire the rank of divine beings and objects of worship. The evil spirits not infrequently secure more homage than the good; and, generally, the individual, the earthly spirits, whose connection with man's fortunes is the more palpable, receive more adoration than the abstract, celestial, and highly exalted divinities.

The religion has little connection with moral conduct; but magic- the practice of rites which are regarded as spells, giving power over the spirits, disarming their anger, or otherwise crippling their dreadful power — is much used. Hence abound among these races magicians, medicine-men, systems of propitiation or communication with the unseen. powers, mysteries, and circles or brotherhoods of the initiated.

There seems to be a more general and firmer belief in a life after death than among the white races; but the ghostlife and its character have less connection with the kind of life led on earth than in those nations among the higher races where faith in immortality appears. In exceptional tribes and exceptional conditions among each of these races, religion has risen to much higher ideas of God and worship, -ideas so high in one or two instances that, as Waitz says, "If we do not like to call them monotheists, we may at least say of them that they have come very near to the boundaries of true monotheism."

Take the conception of the Supreme God found among the aborigines of the Society Islands: "He was. Taaroa was his name. He abode in the void. No earth, no sky, no men. Taaroa calls, but none answers; and, alone existing, he became the Universe. The props of the world are Taaroa; the rocks are Taaroa; the sands are Taaroa. It is thus he himself is named."

But such lofty flights of the religious instinct are very rare indeed among these races. The general level is that

one far below it which I have described, and by which they are separated by a wide gap from the Mongoloid and white.

races.

And, now that we have compared the general religious plane of these three races with that of the higher races, let us compare them one with another.

As their notions concerning religion are thus in general crude and superstitious, there would naturally be less special and characteristic developments, less differentiations one from another, than is found in the faiths of the more civilized nations. Nevertheless, we can discern between the religious ideas and customs of these three lower races differences of a decidedly specific character. We find, e.g., in the brown race, more especially in the Polynesian tribes, a development of the imaginative faculty quite superior to that of the other two; and, in accordance with this, we find their religion distinguished by its luxuriant mythology. The powers of nature are personified, and the processes of nature dramatized with a poetic richness of which we hardly find the counterpart till we reach the great Aryan mythologies.

Passing on to the black race, "we find the joyous, careless temperament of the negro reflected," as Ticle says, "in his religion as clearly as the sombre, melancholy character of the American Indian in his." The negroes are affectionate and social; and we find among them ancestor worship flourishing, and reverence for animals prominent.

The red race, with their taciturnity and stoical indifference to pain, smile at sufferings which bring anguish to more sensitively organized races. Not unnaturally, therefore, in their religious rites we find bloody ceremonies, extraordinary fasts and self-tortures, adopted as grateful to their gods, or as the signs and seal of sacred character.

In the black, red, and brown races, as we just observed, animistic ideas and usages generally characterize religion. When we come to the yellow, or Mongoloid, race,— or, as some prefer to call it, the Turanian race,— we come to one in which social progress has reached far higher levels. In at

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