The Churches and Modern Thought

§ 3. Parallels in the Beliefs of Primitive Man, and some Remarks Upon Them

I must ask the reader’s patience if I postpone my final remarks on Progressive Revelation until I have adduced some illustrations of the beliefs and customs of primitive man, as here also this same theory has to apply. Thus far the pagan beliefs have appeared to be of a comparatively harmless character; but this can by no means be said of the beliefs of savage man. He does not confine himself, like his more civilised brother, to mystical beliefs in Saviours who once upon a time suffered for him, and whose body and blood are to be symbolically assimilated; but, being of a realistic (or shall we say materialistic?) turn of mind, he prefers (the inevitable result of a restricted intellectual development)113 to satisfy his religious emotions with the spectacle of a real human-divine sufferer, and by a sacrificial feast of real flesh and blood. Can this be God’s method of revealing Himself? True, the religious convictions of civilised man have been a fruitful source of human agony, both physical and mental, in many a bloody fight and massacre, in cruel and relentless persecutions, in every refinement of excruciating torture and pitiable distress to body and mind; but it is possible to gloze over all this with various specious arguments. It is not so easy to do so with examples drawn from the history of savage races. The only thing is that so few have ever had these examples brought before them, or, at least, have ever thought of connecting them with anything that has to do with the truth of Christianity. I shall, therefore, now give some illustrations of the beliefs and customs of primitive man. A vivid description may succeed in convincing the reader of the absurdity of the new theory, where mere vague ideas of savage ritual would fail. “Of the human sacrifices of rude peoples, those of the Mexicans are perhaps the most instructive, for in them the theanthropic character of the victim comes out most clearly.”114 “When we go to the records of the cultures and creeds of Mexico and Peru, records wonderfully preserved in the teeth of the fanaticism which would have destroyed them all if it could, we stand clear of the frauds and prejudices alike of Jew and Christian.... We are faced by a civilisation and a religion that reached wealth and complexity by normal evolution from the stages of early savagery and barbarism without ever coming in contact with those of Europe till the moment of collision and destruction.”115 We shall begin, therefore, with the ancient American.

“Terrible was the prestige of the priesthood of Mexico. The greater the State grew, the larger were the hecatombs of human victims. Almost every god had to be propitiated in the same way; but above all must the war-god be for ever glutted with the smoking hearts of slain captives. Scarcely any historian, says Prescott, estimates the number of human beings sacrificed yearly throughout the Empire at less than 20,000, and some make it 50,000. The Franciscan monks computed that 2,500 victims were annually sacrificed in the town and district of Mexico alone. Of this doomed host, Huitzilopochtli had the lion’s share; and it is recorded that at the dedication of his great new temple A.D. 1486 [that is to say, nearly 1,500 years after God was pleased to reveal Himself definitely to mankind] there were slain in his honour 70,000 prisoners of war, who had been reserved for the purpose for years throughout the Empire. They formed a train two miles long, and the work of priestly butchery went on for several days.”116

“At every festival of the God there was a new hecatomb of victims, and we may conceive how the chronic spectacle burnt itself in on the imagination of the people.... And then the horror of the sacrificial act! In the great majority of the sacrifices the victim was laid living on the convex stone and held by the limbs, while the slayer cut open his breast with the sacred flint (or rather obsidian) knife—the ancient knife used before men had the use of metals, and therefore most truly religious—and tore out the palpitating heart, which was held on high to the all-seeing sun, before being set to burn in incense in front of the idol, whose lips, and the walls of whose shrines, were devoutly daubed with blood.”

“In connection with one annual festival of Tezcatlipoca, the Creator and ‘soul of the world,’ who combined the attributes of perpetual youthful beauty with the function of the God of Justice and Retribution, as the Winter Sun, there was selected for immolation a young male captive of especial beauty, who was treated with great reverence for a whole year before being sacrificed.... When all was over the priests piously improved the occasion, preaching that all this had been typical of human destiny, while the aristocracy sacramentally ate the victim’s roasted limbs.”

“They [Christians] mystically eat the body of the slain God. Now, this very act was performed by the Mexicans, not only literally as we have seen, but in the symbolic way also; and they connected their sacraments with the symbol of the cross.”

“That the Mexicans were no longer cannibals by taste is shown by the fact that in the great siege by Cortez they died of starvation by thousands. They never ate fellow citizens: only the sacrificially slain captive.”

“The strangest thing of all is that their frightful system of sacrifice was bound up not only with a strict and ascetic sexual morality, but with an emphatic humanitarian doctrine. If asceticism be virtue, they cultivated virtue zealously. There was a Mexican Goddess of Love, and there was of course plenty of vice; but nowhere could men win a higher reputation for sanctity by living in celibacy. Their saints were numerous. They had nearly all the formulas of Christian morality, so-called. The priests themselves mostly lived in strict celibacy; and they educated children with the greatest vigilance in their temple schools and higher colleges. They taught the people to be peaceful, to bear injuries with meekness, to rely on God’s mercy and not on their own merits; they taught, like Jesus and the Pagans, that adultery could be committed by the eyes and the heart; and, above all, they exhorted men to feed the poor. The public hospitals were carefully attended to, at a time when some Christian countries had none. They had the practice of confession and absolution, and in the regular exhortation of the confessor there was this formula: Clothe the naked and feed the hungry, whatever privations it may cost thee; for remember their flesh is like thine, and they are men like thee; cherish the sick, for they are the image of God. And in this very same exhortation there was further urged on the penitent the special duty of instantly procuring a slave for sacrifice to the deity.”

The Mexican believed in the resurrection of the Man-God. Dr. Frazer relates how “the idea that the God thus slain in the person of his representative comes to life again immediately was graphically represented in the Mexican ritual by skinning the slain man-god, and clothing in his skin a living man, who thus became the new representative of the god-head.”117

It is civilisation that determines the tone of religion. In Peru, where the civilisation was higher and the priesthood less powerful, the sacrificial system was less burdensome and less terrible. Thus human sacrifices were practically extinct. The Peruvians had the institution of a Holy Communion, in which they ate of a sacred bread, sancu, sprinkled with the blood of a sacrificed sheep, the priest pronouncing this formula: “Take heed how ye eat this sancu; for he who eats it in sin and with a double will and heart is seen by our Father, the Sun, who will punish him with grievous troubles.” The Spaniards themselves recognised that the Mexicans ate the mystical body of the God with every sign of devotion and contrition; and they were so far from depreciating the Peruvian Communion that they supposed St. Bartholomew had established it.118

With these facts confronting us, it is nothing short of marvellous to find many learned divines completely ignoring them in their apologetic efforts. I say marvellous, for I assume they possess honesty of purpose and some acquaintance with ancient beliefs; but perhaps I am wrong in the latter assumption. The continuance of the celebration of the Holy Eucharist until the present day is held to be one of the evidences for the Christian faith, and this on the ground that the rite could not have survived if Christ had not founded it. For some reason, best known to the apologist, the almost universal observance of the same ceremony, ages before the Christian era, and its survival among the nations who finally adopted Christianity, are entirely overlooked. Thus Dr. Maclear, in his book, The Evidential Value of the Holy Eucharist, says: “The singular rite has survived all the vicissitudes of more than 1,000 years.... The early Christian would inform a supposed questioner that the meal was a sacrificial feast, instituted by Him from Whom we are called Christians, and Who died for us on the Cross. Here, then, we are on solid ground. The rite, so unique and so unprecedented, rests on an objective historical fact.” One would think that Dr. Maclear had entirely neglected the study of ancient and even modern non-Christian119 beliefs.

There is another class of primitive sacrificial custom which claims our careful attention, in order that we may see whether it manifests the beginning of a revelation from God. Even if we could agree that all these gruesome details represent a savage’s glimmerings of the truth, we must allow that the theory collapses when the object of the custom can be shown to have little or nothing to do with religion in any true sense of the word. Subtle intellects are capable of maintaining that the worship of ancestors, or of the Sun, or of imaginary devils, betokens a dim perception of God; but when it comes to the propitiation of a vegetation-god solely for the sake of the material benefits expected to be derived from his cult, surely it is time to dismiss the theory as worthless. “All the world over, savages and semi-civilised people are in the habit of sacrificing human victims, whose bodies are buried in the field with the seed of corn, or other bread stuffs. Often enough the victim’s blood is mixed with grain in order to fertilise it. The most famous instance is that of the Khonds of Orissa, who chose special victims, known as Meriahs, and offered them up to ensure good harvests. The Meriah was often kept years before being sacrificed. He was regarded as a consecrated being, and treated with extreme affection, mingled with deference.”120 “The periodical sacrifices,” says Dr. Frazer, in The Golden Bough, “were generally so arranged by tribes and divisions of tribes that each head of a family was enabled, at least once a year, to procure a shred of flesh for his fields, generally about the time when his chief crop was laid down.” Khonds in distress often sold their children as Meriahs, “considering the beatification of their souls certain, and their death, for the benefit of mankind, the most honourable possible.” Their children were representatives of the Deity. With advancing civilisation we have the substitution of an animal in place of the human representative of the God. In some cases the worshippers tore the living animal to pieces with their teeth. The rending and devouring of live bulls, calves, and goats seems to have been a regular feature of the Dionysiac rites, the participators in the orgy fancying that they were devouring the actual body and blood of the god. With the further advance of civilisation (or, according to the latest Christian theory, with the further advance of God’s revelation), as in the Mediterranean region, the bodies of the gods of agriculture were eaten by their votaries in the shape of cakes of bread, or other food stuffs, and their blood was drunk in the form of wine.121

If Dr. Frazer be right as to the priority of the idea of a vegetation-god in cults commonly associated with the Sun, then Krishna, Osiris, Dionysus or Bacchus, Adonis, Attis, and other Saviours whose deaths and resurrections were annually celebrated at the spring equinox (our Easter), may have been primarily vegetation-victims, the abstract ideas which identified the death and resurrection of the god with the annual winter sleep and spring revival being finally fathered upon the worship. Whatever explanation may be the correct one for the phenomenon of a common mythos over the greater portion of the globe, it is certainly not that of a Progressive Revelation. Such an explanation has never been mooted by anyone but the Christian apologist. “Among early men and savages every act of life has a sacred significance, and agriculture especially is everywhere and always invested with a special sanctity. To us it would seem natural that the act of sowing seed should be regarded as purely practical and physiological; that the seed should be looked upon merely as the part of the plant intended for reproduction, and that its germination should be accepted as a natural and normal process. Savages and early men, however, had no such conceptions. To them the whole thing is a piece of natural magic.”122 Are we, then, to regard this working of primitive thought as the working of the Holy Spirit? Surely we may dismiss such a preposterous theory? It will serve the Church no good purpose; for, while thinking men will be further than ever estranged, it will furnish the militant agnostic with a fresh weapon for his attacks upon her.

Whatever may have been the ultimate origin of the idea of God, and of the belief in His expiatory death and subsequent resurrection, the origin of the custom of eating Him sacramentally permits of a very simple explanation. “Du Chaillu notes that some of his West African followers, when going on an expedition, brought out the skulls of their ancestors (which they religiously preserved) and scraped off small portions of the bone, which they mixed with the water and drank, giving as a reason for this conduct that their ancestors were brave, and that by drinking a portion of them they too became brave and fearless. Here we have a simple and early case of that habit of ‘eating the god’ to whose universality and importance Dr. Frazer has called attention.”123 It is a common early belief, which may still be met with, that by eating a certain animal the consumer will become possessed of its qualities. It is notorious, for instance, that the Miris of Northern India prize tiger’s flesh for men, because it gives them strength and courage. And apparently the same belief exists also in Southern India, for I remember our Madrassi ayah—a Christian by the bye—begging for the hind leg of a panther (shot by my wife), and explaining that she wanted to eat it in order to make her muzbut (strong). I may mention also that certain religious rites still in vogue among the Hindoos—disgusting as they are, not only to our ideas, but in fact—arise from a similar notion.

Herbert Spencer discusses this primitive idea in his Principles of Sociology. He explains how “attributes or properties, as we understand them, are not recognisable by the savage—are abstractions which neither his faculties can grasp nor his language express. Hence certain beliefs, everywhere conspicuous among the uncivilised. A special potency which some object or part of an object displays belongs to it in such a wise that it may be acquired by consuming or possessing this object or part. The powers of a conquered antagonist are supposed to be gained by devouring him. The Dakotah eats the heart of a slain foe to increase his own courage; the New Zealander swallows his dead enemy’s eyes that he may see further; the Abipone consumes tiger’s flesh thinking so to gain the tiger’s strength and ferocity—cases which recall the legend about Zeus devouring Metis that he might become possessed of her wisdom. Clearly the implied mode of thought, shown even in the medical prescriptions of past ages, is a mode of thought necessarily persisting until analysis has disclosed the complexities of causal relations.”124 “The belief that the qualities of any individual are appropriated by eating him is illustrated by the statement of Stanbridge, that when Australians kill an infant they feed an older child with it, believing ‘that by its eating as much as possible of the roasted infant it will possess the strength of both.’ Elsewhere dead relations are consumed in pursuance of an allied belief. We read of the Cucamas that, ‘as soon as a relation died, these people assembled and ate him roasted or boiled, according as he was thin or fat!’”125

It is easy, then, to understand why a savage should desire to partake of the flesh of an animal or man whom he regards as divine. By eating the body of the god he shares in the god’s attributes and powers. “And when,” as Dr. Frazer points out,126 “the god is a corn-god, the corn is his proper body; when he is a vine-god, the juice of the grape is his blood; and so by eating the bread and drinking the wine the worshipper partakes of the real body and blood of the god.” If the apologist, nothing daunted, maintains that there is a religious germ in these primitive superstitions, it is practically tantamount to saying that every superstition contains such a germ; that superstition and religion are, in fact, often synonymous terms. I thought it was only the sceptic who said that. Before committing himself any further to a supernatural theory which is so obviously untenable, I do entreat the average apologist to read carefully the works of great thinkers who have made primitive man their especial study. Let him read, for instance, Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Sociology, where he will find a natural and mind-satisfying explanation of primitive ideas concerning supernatural agents, ghosts, spirits, demons, gods, resurrection, another life, inspiration, divination, sacrifices, fasting, propitiation, and prayer. He will learn, also, much that he ought to know concerning ancestor-worship, idol-worship, fetish-worship, animal-worship, plant-worship, nature-worship, and the heathen deities generally. He should also read Frazer’s Golden Bough, J. M. Robertson’s Pagan Christs and Christianity and Mythology, and other scholarly and informing works of this description, instead of confining his studies to works of an apologetic character, where everything incompatible with existing Christian theories is carefully omitted, or coloured out of all recognition.

§ 4. The Solar Myth

The resemblances to ancient myths are not confined to the principal incidents in the life of Christ. Many of the most noteworthy events related in the Old Testament have their counterpart in widespread legends. That the stories of the Creation, Fall, and Deluge are legends is well known—a visit to the British Museum should convince the most captious critic on this point—but it is not so well known that ancient folk-lore contains stories similar to those of the Tower of Babel, the trial of Abraham’s faith, Jacob’s vision of the ladder between earth and heaven, the finding of Moses in an ark, the transformation of Moses’ rod into a serpent, the Israelites’ passage through the Red Sea on dry land, Moses smiting the rock and thus producing water, the reception by Moses of the Ten Commandments from God, Balaam’s expostulating ass, Joshua’s command to the sun and the sun’s obedience, Samson and his exploits, Elijah’s ascent to heaven, and Jonah’s sojourn for three days and three nights in the belly of a fish.

This Jonah episode has an important bearing on the subject under discussion, as it is a typical case of an absorption of the universal mythos. Among other authorities, Godfrey Higgins tells us: “The story of Jonas swallowed up by a whale is nothing but part of the fiction of Hercules, described in the Heracleid or Labours of Hercules, of whom the same story was told, and who was swallowed up at the very same place, Joppa, and for the same period of time, three days.”127 Again, with the exception of those who refuse to acknowledge anything damaging to the literal truth of Holy Writ, all professors of theology are agreed that the miracle recorded in the book of Jonah is not a historical fact. This in spite of the alleged personal interviews with God as there recounted; while the plea that we must make allowance for oriental imagery serves only to throw discredit upon historians on whom we are relying for facts upon which the scheme of Christianity depends. Now, the story of the three days’ sojourn of Hercules and other heroes in the bowels of the earth, or the belly of a fish, is only a different version of the myth concerning the death and resurrection of a god which we find to be prevalent over nearly the whole world. And, according to the new Christian theory, this shows an intuition of Christ’s death and resurrection!

The advanced theologians, who are presenting us with this theory, have to explain, among other things, how it was that Christ himself took the “Jonah and whale” story seriously, treating it as sober history. He spoke of no mere allegory when He said: “For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth.”128 Neither Christ himself nor the Apostles spoke of any revelation embodied in heathen beliefs. Very much the reverse. Yet the Bishop of Birmingham (late of Worcester), speaking to the adversaries of Christianity, informs them: “You say that we find in Christianity the relics of paganism. On the contrary, we find in paganism, intermingled with much that is false, superstitious, and horrible, the anticipations of Christianity.” Is that why we have paid them the compliment of adopting their dates for the birth and death of their Saviours?129 Canon P. H. Robinson goes so far as to say that Christianity has benefited by the addition of heathen thought [N.B. He owns there has been this addition], and that it is yet to benefit by further contact with heathen thought! His actual words are: “If Greek and Roman thought were needed for a full appreciation of the meaning of the Incarnation, why may we not say the same of Indian and Chinese thought? Surely we are justified in believing that every country and every people have something to contribute to Christianity and that the completion of the Christian revelation awaits the contribution of each. We believe that there are many important aspects of the Christian truth which have never been understood, simply because Christianity has not yet been reflected in the experience of those nations of the world which are still heathen.”130