use of the term 'tradition' in the narrow and misleading sense, which it has been made to bear in the controversy between Protestantism and the Church of Rome. The Holy Scriptures themselves are a part, perhaps the most vital and central part, of the characteristic tradition of Christendom; and they are in unquestionable accord, for the purposes of our inquiry, with all the extraneous part of tradition, whether in documents, or institutions, or in the unwritten form of that sense or instinct which is characteristic of all religious bodies, and which supplies in a manner the invisible but very real atmosphere, wherein they move. This tradition, firmly anchored in the Bible, and interpreted and sustained by the unvarying voices of believers from the first beginning of known records, exhibits religion not as an Art, but as a divine Gift: not as a thing developed, like our industrial processes, through the gradual accumulative work of the human faculties, operating from many independent centres throughout the world, but as one gift, associated with the worship of One God, given at one centre to a common ancestry including all the tribes, races, and nations, now known as Aryan, or as Semitic, or as belonging to that third group of races, which we find intermingled with the Aryan and the Semitic; if not to the entire body of mankind throughout the earth. In this widespread and most solemn tradition, the moral evil which afflicts and deforms the world is referred back to an origin, which, even if the description of it should be admitted to be parabolical, resolves itself into simple disobedience. Upon this disobedience follows its punishment, in a great change of the conditions of our human existence. But with the record of the punishment is instantly joined the promise of a deliverance and a recovery, to be wrought out, at the cost of his own pain and suffering, through a personal Redeemer. According to this tradition, religion was no mere answer to a want, or faculty, or appetite, of our nature, seeking a key to the enigmas of the world, conscious of a weakness that called out for aid, and aspiring to an indefinite duration. It was a provision with which we were fore-armed; and which had for its first point of departure, so far as the object of it was concerned, the summit of its perfection. This was the perfect harmony between the creature, in all his faculties at the actual stage of their development, and the One Creator, in whom were summed up the qualities of Father, Governor, Provider, and Judge. In this representation of the method by which we became possessed of religion, of its genesis upon the earth, is embodied the principle which, in the fulness of time, received expression through the telling words of an apostle :

2 Some forty years back, for example, Dr. Shuttleworth, a divine in repute at Oxford, published a work called Not Tradition, but Revelation: by Revelation meaning Scripture. But how, except by a tradition extraneous to Scripture, did he know what was Scripture ?

1 Cor. xiv. 36.

'What, came the word of God out from you, or came it unto you only?' A broad and clear line is drawn around it, as to its matter, its mode, and its authority. Its matter is monotheistic. Its mode, conclusively indicated, if not literally described, is that of a conveyance from the Deity to his creatures; and this mode carries the conviction of an extraneous origin as rationally as the most formal and best attested message. The difference between the objective communication of religion, and its subjective evolution, is radical; and no ingenuity or sophistry can cast a doubt upon the question which of the two it is that is expressed by Scripture, and that has been believed and held by the races on whom Scripture has exercised its religious influences. Its authority is not only the authority, venerable as this would be, of the highest form of human consent, speaking for itself; but it is that of the Being, superior and supreme, from whom we spring, and on whom we depend.

The scheme which I have called Anti-traditional, so far as I understand it, sweeps away at once the whole mass of this authoritative testimony. It purposes indeed to deal, at any rate in the first instance, with the Aryan races only; but its moral, if not its logical scope appears to be unlimited. It touches these races at the first inception of their mental processes in regard to religion. It describes the first and gradual growth of a sense of need, and of a progressively improving provision for that need. It seems to have for its first effect only to destroy the historical credit of the documents of our religion. But in truth it does a great deal more than this; it alters radically, in the stage of their commencement, alike its matter, its mode, and its authority. As to its matter, it is no longer the simplicity of perfection, the Creed of One God. It aims at expressing power, which is superior indeed, but not of necessity supreme; power represented not by Unity, but in multitude of forms; power lodged in what are apparently physical, not rational or moral entities, and so far of an order inferior to our own; power not always associated by any obvious link with any qualities of moral character or action. The subjective part of the scheme, the ideas of disobedience or sin, of lapse and recovery, scarcely find a place of any sort, however limited, at this stage of incipient religion. As to its mode, this is wholly transmuted; religion comes out from us, does not come unto us; it is not a gift from on high, otherwise than as it is the result of faculties conferred upon us by our Creator; it is grown within the precinct of our own being; it is the product of religiousness. And this religious appetite, it may be observed in passing, is held to be, like our appetite for food, a standing and urgent demand of our nature, which exacts its own satisfaction, and thus involves a provision for the permanent existence of religion among men. Lastly, as to its authority; this, instead of being full-formed and imperative from the commencement, is at that stage infinitesimally small. In amount it grows with the accumulation of the religious processes woven out of

the mind of many generations. But then, if we find also certain periods of reaction and effacement, periods when

Nec pueri credunt, nisi qui nondum ære lavantur,'

deductions must be made accordingly. And if it should appear that the times, when the ideas of the Deity and worship have receded, are times which, in other respects, have been times of powerful development, and the races among whom we observe the phenomenon the most remarkable races of the contemporary world, then it would seem that this deduction must be formidably large, and the untouched remainder comparatively small. As to the quality of the authority attaching to religion under the most favourable circumstances, we can only say that, as water can rise no higher than its source, so, the source being human, the elevation of religion and its force can be human only.

As, however, this theory of the first genesis of Aryan religion appears to be pregnant with very important consequences, and as it makes very high claims to a strictly scientific character, an account of it ought not to be taken on trust. Nor can I in any manner do it fuller justice, than by accepting the description of it from the pen of M. Ernest Renan; for its base is closely allied with philology, and there is, I suppose, no more distinguished philologist.

In his remarkable and most interesting introductory lecture On the Part falling to the Semitic Races in the History of Civilisation,' he points out that, since the seventeenth century, and even earlier, the learned have defined the affinities of the Semitic tongues; and that the Germans of the present century, receiving the gift of Sanskrit from the English, have, by means of this type of a common ancestry in language, established the unity of the Indo-Germanic or IndoEuropean group, which includes the Celtic, Teutonic, Slavonian, the tongues of the Greek and Italian peninsulas, Armenian, Persian, and some others. Then he proceeds :

A côté de la Philologie comparée s'est fondée en Allemagne, il y a quelques années, une mythologie comparée, laquelle a démontré que tous les peuples indoeuropéens eurent à l'origine, avec une même langue, une même religion, dont chacun a emporté, en se séparant du berceau commun, les membres épars. Cette religion, c'est le culte des forces et des phénomènes de la nature, aboutissant par le développement philosophique à une sorte de panthéisme."

It is not necessary for the purpose I have in view to institute any minute exhibition of the parallel process carried on by the Semitic races in the elaboration of a religion. It may suffice to say that, according to the theory, monotheism was their work, and their great gift to mankind. We owe them nothing, says M. Renan, in polity, nothing in art, nothing in science and philosophy, little in Paris: Michel Levy Frères, 1862. 6 Pp. 10, 11.

Juv. Sat. ii. 152.

poetry. We owe them, it is true, the alphabet, an isolated though momentous gift. But their main service is in another sphere. Que leur devons-nous? Nous leur devons la religion.' Except India,

China, and Japan, and except the savage races, le monde entier a adopté les religions sémitiques.' 7

This theory does not in terms exclude the belief that the Semites received their religion through the channel of divine revelation; but it is part of a wider system, by which that belief seems to be wholly excluded. According to M. Renan, this primitive cultus of nature was not a later parallel growth in many places at once, but was carried away from the common cradle by the whole of the Aryan races, and is found in them all alike. That is a broad allegation of fact, which I seek to try by the Homeric Poems, so far as they afford materials for the purpose.

8

I turn now to another high authority, Mr. Max Müller. According to him, religion, which may signify certain bodies of doctrine handed down in connection with this or that particular system, signifies also a faculty of faith in man, independent of all historical religions:' a faculty which, independent of, nay in spite of, sense and reason, enables man to apprehend the Infinite under different names, and under varying disguises.' I stop for a moment at this point, to dismiss from consideration the phrases which, without doubt under the influence of his own strong religious feeling, and of his repugnance to materialism, Mr. Max Müller has here introduced for the enhancement of the religious faculty. I do not acknowledge the existence of any legitimate faculty which exists or acts in spite of sense and reason;' or which is 'in a certain sense contradicted by sense and reason;' or which is able to overcome both reason and sense.' 9

In the former of its two significations, our expositor denominates religion Comparative Theology;' in the latter Theoretic Theology.' The belief of African and Melanesian savages is younger in time, he continues, than the Vedic hymns, or the books of Confucius; but represents an earlier and far more primitive phase in point of growth. In these words appears to be seminally involved something of the principle, which has been exhibited by M. Renan. Is it intended, to teach that the more grovelling or the less elevated, and the less developed, in the province of religious belief and practice, is to be esteemed the more primitive? If so, then that epithet, which from Christian history has long carried with it venerable associations, must, when transported into a wider field, stoop to be shorn of its honours.10

'The theory that there was a primeval preternatural revelation

* Pp. 15, 21.

• Introduction to the Science of Religion: Four Lectures at the Royal Institution, 1870.

granted to the fathers of the human race,' and that grains of truth in other systems are the scattered fragments of that sacred heirloom,' has now no more supporters, than the theory of one complete and perfect primeval language.' The verbal scope of this declaration is more or less ambiguous. It is just possible to hold that there was a primeval revelation, and that, in the course of its obscuration, it naturally left notes and traces behind it, without holding that the whole of the better materials of the heathen schemes are due to these notes and traces. But the apparent intent of the passage is to put a negative on what is commonly understood under the name of a primeval revelation. This, he states further on," is only another name for natural religion, and, in any other or higher sense, 'rests on no authority but the speculations of philosophers.'

In his explanation of the first stage of religious growth, Max Müller differs from Renan as to the form, if not as to the substance, of their theories. The primitive religion of the first is an echo of nature, a sort of hymn of naturalism'où l'idée d'une cause unique n'apparaît que par moments et avec beaucoup d'indécision.' 12 But for Max Müller the image of the ancient religion is the image of the Father, the Father of all the nations upon earth: 13 and that which made the Greeks a people was this their primitive religion; it was a dim recollection of the common allegiance they owed from time immemorial to the great Father of gods and men; it was their belief in the old Zeus of Dodona, in the Panhellenic Zeus.14 Upon the question how far this account is historically accurate, I shall have to remark hereafter. I cite it now to illustrate the position of this writer relatively to the doctrine of M. Renan. Unlike that of M. Renan, his primitive religion is, among Aryans as well as Semites, personal and monotheistic; but they agree in the two points, that it found expression under a symbolic form supplied by external nature, and that it was the product of the religious faculty in man. The case stood, in some degree, as the doctrine of ideas stands in the representation of Aristotle.15 The matter of religion was not originally given to us; but we were TεOUKÓTES Tws, so as to conceive and harbour it. Religion was a sacred dialect of human speech dependent for its expression on the resources of language.' Differing from the Semitic system (as to which Max Müller is not at one with Renan), the original Aryan religion is not a worship of Nature, but a worship of God in Nature, and in her several powers. Hence the gods of the Aryan pantheon assume a strong individuality, so that a transition to monotheism required a powerful struggle, and seldom took effect without iconoclastic revolutions, or philosophical despair.' 16

6

6

The third great religious group is called less definitely " by Max Müller Turanian; and he gives it, from its tongues, the felicitous

12 Ubi sup. p. 21.

11 P. 24.
15 Eth. Nicom.

Is Four Lectures, p. 12.
Lectures, p. 30.

14 P. 27. 17 P. 31.