Images de page
PDF
ePub

Pursuing his idea of the influence of the aspects of nature on man, Mr. Buckle, who has a theory for every thing, discovers that the cause of Catholicism lies in earthquakes:

"The peculiar province of the imagination," he informs us, "being to deal with the unknown, every event which is unexplained as well as important, is a direct stimulus to our imaginative faculties. . Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are more frequent and more destructive in Italy, and in the Spanish and Portuguese peninsula, than in any other of the great countries, and it is precisely there that superstition is most rife, and the superstitious classes most powerful. Those were the countries where the clergy first established their authority, where the worst corruptions of Christianity took place, and where superstition has during the longest period retained the firmest hold."

In other words, sequence is cause, as Hume proves; whence post hoc, ergo propter hoc, the great logical principle of the positivists. But increase of Popery follows increase of earthquakes; therefore-the consequence is clear. And not only is Christianity extracted out of earthquakes, but also, by a similar chemistry, Providence is derived from the plague.

Our ignorance about another life, he says, is complete :

"On this subject the reason is perfectly silent; the imagination, therefore, is uncontrolled. . . . The vulgar universally ascribe to the intervention of the Deity those diseases which are peculiarly fatal. The opinion that pestilence is a manifestation of the Divine anger, though it has long been dying away, is by no means extinct even in the most civilised countries. Superstitions of this kind will of course be strongest either where medical knowledge is most backward, or where disease is most abundant."

[ocr errors]

It is in tropical climates that nature is most terrible, and here, says our author, "imagination runs riot, and religion is founded on fear; while in Europe nature is subject to man, and reason rules supreme." This theme he illustrates by the extreme instances of India and Greece; and he generalises his conclusion into the statement that "the tendency of Asiatic civilisation was to widen the distance between men and their deities; the tendency of Greek civilisation was to diminish it." Hence "in Greece we for the first time meet with hero-worship, that is, the deification of mortals;" this could not take place in tropical countries. "It is therefore natural that it should form no part of the ancient Indian religion; neither was it known to the Egyptians, nor to the Persians, nor, so far as I am aware, to the Arabians;" but it was part of the national religion of Greece, and has been found so

natural to Europeans, that "the same custom was afterwards renewed with eminent success by the Romish Church."

Perhaps no writer of pretension ever made a more disgraceful exhibition of ignorance and unreason than Mr. Buckle in these passages. Unreason; for if the Catholic cultus of saints is to be identified with the Greek deification of heroes, then certainly this deification is not simply European; it is as natural to the Indian Catholic as to the Italian or German, not to mention the Orientals. Exactly the same thing is found in Mahometanism, wherever it spreads. If Allah alone receives divine honours, any how the chief cultus is paid to the tomb of the prophet, and to the graves of the various holy personages with which Moslem countries are so thickly studded. But if this cultus is not what Mr. Buckle meant by the Greek hero-worship, then his mention of the Catholic practice is invidious, impertinent, and utterly irrelevant to his argument. Ignorance; for the "deification of mortals," so far from forming no part of the ancient Indian and Egyptian religions, was their very central idea and foundation. The fearful, terrible gods that Mr. Buckle's imagination is so full of, were only elemental deities, rising and falling with the world, destined to be annihilated; while the human soul was to last for ever, and was in its essence superior to all those beings that kept it in a tedious but temporary thraldom. The whole idea of the Vedas is the power of the Brahmin over the elemental deities, exerted by means of the sacrifice. The deities in question, though vast in power and wonderfully large, are by themselves undefined and vague; they want personality, and therefore require personal direc tion: though they are in some sense universal intellect and soul, yet they are formless and void; they are mere blunder. ers till they are directed by the more sure intelligence ot minds akin to those of man. Hence, in the Vedantic genesis of things, the elemental deities are the matter or forces which compose the universe; while the intelligent agents who conduct the creative process are the seven primeval sages, Rishis, or Manus, whose very name attests their human nature.* is by the sacrifice of these Rishis, and by the metres they chanted, that the mundane deities received their place and office in the world; and, what is more, the sacrifices of the Vedantic religion are all identified with this primitive creative offering. The seven priests who offer the Soma sacrifice, so often mentioned in the hymns, are only the successors of the primitive Rishis or Angiras, whose work they carry on. The

It

See the fable of Purusha, Rig Veda, lib. viii. cap. iv. hymns 17, 18, 19; and White Yadjur Veda, cap. xxxi.

Sama Veda was their ritual; and they pretended that this ceremonial was necessary for the preservation of the universe, by continuing the action of the seven creative forces which first formed the world. In the more modern system of the Puranas the same agency is found. The world is successively destroyed and reconstructed; there are seven such revolutions in each day of Brahma, and each time the world is restored by a Manu and seven attendant Rishis. Here, instead of the subserviency of man to nature, we have the inferiority of nature to man, and the deification of men in as exaggerated a form as can possibly be conceived. The same may be said of the Buddhist system: the seven human Buddhas are successively the great rulers of the universe. And here the facts are so directly contrary to Mr. Buckle's crude speculations, that in the very country where nature is most intractable, and where natural forces exert the most terrific influence on man, -in the great frozen plateau of Thibet,—there the deification of man is carried to the farthest extent, and the Grand Llama, or living Buddha, is actually identified with the Supreme God. With regard to the Egyptians, Mr. Buckle founds a hasty conclusion on a few words of Herodotus; and cares nothing for the universal and most ancient worship of Osiris, the human god, with whom every man is identified at death in the ritual. In Egypt the human soul, or man, was superior to the elemental deities. "I am your lord," says the soul to the mundane gods, in a monumental inscription;* "come and do homage to me; for you belong to me in right of my divine father." The same doctrine may be found in the EgyptoGnostic lucubrations of the pseudo-Hermes Trismegistus. In the Persian system, Mithra seems to have held a place somewhat similar to that of Osiris in Egypt. At any rate, so far from its being true that the deification of mortals was unknown, the fact is that the king assumed successively the insignia of each of the seven planets, and was adored by the people as the incarnate presence of each. Of the ancient Arabian religion Mr. Buckle professes his ignorance; the name, therefore, is only inserted to swell bis catalogue to the eye, without any corresponding increase in the value of his induction. As we have shown each of his other assertions to be exactly the contrary of the truth, we need not trouble ourselves with disproving one that he owns to be a mere guess. In a later page he says, that in Central America, as in India, the national religion was "a system of complete and unmitigated terror. Neither there, nor in Mexico, nor in Peru, nor in Egypt, did the people desire to represent their deities in human forms, * Champollion, Grammaire, p. 285. ↑ Dabistan, p. 42.

or ascribe to them human attributes." On the contrary, we can prove that, in all these countries, the gods-at least the human-formed gods-are in sculptures only distinguishable from men by the addition of their respective symbols; while, on the other hand, the Egyptian kings and queens are continually represented in the characters of the various gods and goddesses whom they patronised. As to human attributes being ascribed to these gods, it is more difficult to prove this point against Mr. Buckle from the scarcity of poetical legends. But he will find his negative still harder to prove against us. In Mexico, the progenitors of our race, Cihuacohuatl (the woman-serpent, or mother of our flesh) and her husband, are placed among the thirteen great gods; and, as such, take precedence of all the elemental deities, coming next after Tezatlipoca, the creator, and Ometeuctli and his wife, the progenitors of the heroes. In Peru the Aztec sovereign was, as in Egypt, worshiped as the sun. Again, Mr. Buckle's principle is as false as his facts. Religious terrorism is in direct proportion to the humanitarianism of a religion. As among men, according to Mr. Mill, and therefore according to Mr. Buckle, cruelty is in proportion to inequality,-as the despot sheds more blood than the constitutional sovereign, and as the despot by divine right, who claims not only the civil homage but the religious veneration of his people, is obliged to be more severe than the mere military adventurer; so, when we go a step further, and raise a living man, or a caste, into the place of God, we are obliged to hedge them round with a fence of the most bloody rites and laws. The real cause of Brahmin and Mexican cruelty was not because the Divine nature was so separated from mankind, but because it was so identified with a certain class of men that this class was obliged to maintain its position by a system of unmitigated terrorism. The farther we remove God from humanity, the less we care about Him. We could not fancy an Epicurean fighting in defence of his indolent deities. As a general rule, those who persecute are willing to suffer persecution; we cannot fancy any body willing to suffer in defence of an abstract divinity: hence we suppose that the more abstract, intangible, and unreal a religion is, the less cruelty will be perpetrated in its name. This, it appears to us, is the true account of the cruelties of the religions Mr. Buckle enumerates, and not the mere influence of climate and the aspects of nature.

The origin of Mr. Buckle's mistakes here, as in other subjects, is his learned ignorance. He never goes to the best authorities; he scarcely ever consults the originals. If he

had given himself the trouble to read and understand the Vedas, which he so ostentatiously quotes at secondhand, the Puranas, the collections of Egyptian monumental inscriptions, the Zendavesta, and to understand the documents about America collected by M'Culloh, he might have given a rather more rational account of the religions which he pretends to philosophise upon.

In the same unlucky chapter Mr. Buckle declares, what on his principles was inevitable, that “original distinctions of race are altogether hypothetical" (p. 36); in support of which view that eminent positivist Mr. Mill is very properly quoted. As we have to deal now with Mr. Buckle's false learning rather than with his false theories, we can only glance at this great absurdity. For the same race of men preserves its character, not only in every region of the world, but in every period of history, in spite of moral as well as physical influences. Were not the Semitic races every where and always monotheists; whilst all Japhetic nations, from Hindostan to Scandinavia, were originally pantheists or polytheists? Epic poetry, again, is distinctive of the Indo-Germanic race alone. The most amusing example of a nation's fidelity to the character which it obtained on its first appearance in history is afforded by France. Lasaulx has collected the judgments of the ancients upon the Gauls: "Gallia," said Cato, "duas res industriosissime persequitur, rem militarem et argute loqui. Mobilitate et levitate animi novis imperiis studebant" (Cæsar, B. G. ii. 1). "Omnes fere Gallos novis rebus studere et ad bellum mobiliter celeriterque excitari” (Ibid. iii. 10). "Sunt in consiliis capiendis mobiles, et novis plerumque rebus student" (Ibid. iv. 5). “Galli quibus insitum est esse leves" (Trebellius Pollio, Galien. 4). "Gens hominum inquietissima et avida semper vel faciendi principis vel imperii” (Flavius Vopiscus, Saturninus, 7).*

But we must conclude. We have said quite enough to show that Mr. Buckle's learning is as false as his theory, and that the ostentation of his slovenly erudition is but an artifice of ignorance. In his laborious endeavour to degrade the history of mankind, and of the dealings of God with man, to the level of one of the natural sciences, he has stripped it of its philosophical, of its divine, and even of its human character and interest.

[ocr errors]

* "Gaul pursues two things with immense industry,—military matters and neat speaking.' 'Through instability and levity of mind they were meditating the overthrow of the government." "Almost all the men of Gaul are revolutionists, and are easily and quickly excited to war." "In council they are unstable, and generally revolutionary." "The French, to whom levity is natural." "A most restless kind of men, always wanting to set up a king or an empire."

« PrécédentContinuer »