no experience, and which lay beyond the bounds of their customs or ideas. They contented themselves with exacting from the conquered such tribute as they could extort, leaving their new subjects to manage their own affairs much as they had done before, till the conquerors, gradually corrupted by the luxuries which their position afforded, and having failed to make for themselves any firm footing in their new empire, were in their turn overwhelmed by fresh hordes of nomadic invaders. The mighty empire of Rome too fell; bu: how different a record has she left behind! Having learnt in her earliest infancy, better perhaps than any other nation, how to reconcile the conflicting theories of the household and the community, se never flagged in her study of the arts of government. Early imbued with a love of law and order, her people discovered also how to accommodate their rules to the various conditions of those which came under their sway. Her laws penetrated to the remotest boundaries of her possessions, and the rights of a Roman citizen were as clearly defined in Britain as in Rome itself. Thus the Romans have left behind them a system of law the wonder and admiration of all mankind, and which has left indelible marks on the laws and customs, the arts and civilization, of every nation which once formed part of their dominions.

connected with religion. It was looked upon | possessions of which they had hitherto had as a series of regulations handed down from some ancestor who received them by divine inspiration. This notion of the origin of law is so general, that it is to be met with in the traditions of almost every nation Thus we find the Egyptians reputing their laws to the teachings of HERMES (THOTH); while the lawgivers of Greece, MINOS, and LYCURGUS, are inspired, the one by Zeus, the other by Apollo. So too the Iranian lawgiver ZOROASTER is taught by the Good Spirit; and MOSES receives the commandments on Mount Sinai. Now though this idea of law is favorable to the procuring obedience to it, it produces an injurious effect on the law itself, by rendering it too fixed and unalterable. Law, in order to satisfy the requirements and changes of life, should be elastic and capable of adaptation; otherwise, regulations which in their institution were ben ficial will survive to be obnoxious under an altered condition of society. But so long as laws are regarded as divine commands they necessarily retain a great degree of rigidity. The village community, in disconnecting the source of law from the patriarchal power, tended to destroy this asso ciation. The authority of the patriarch was a part of the religion of the early Aryans; he was at once both the ruler and the priest of his family; and though this union between the two characters long continued to have a great influence on the conception of law, the first efforts at a distinction between divine and hu-lowing the adoption of the village community; man commands sprang from the regulations adopted by the assembly of the village. The complete equality and the joint authority exercised by its members was an education in self-government, which was needed to enable them to advance in the path of civilization, teaching them the importance of self-dependence and individual responsibility.

138. Such were among the influences fol

but such influences only gradually asserted themselves, and the extent of their development was very various among different people. In India, the religious element in the household had always a peculiar force, and its influence continued to affect to a great extent the formation of the community. There this r ganization never lost sight of the patriarcha' 137. Those who learnt that lesson best dis- power, and has exhibited a constant tendency played in their history the greatness of its in- to revert to the more primitive social form. fluence, having gained from it a vigor and Among the Slavonic tribes the village commu. readiness to meet and adapt themselves to nity seems to have found its most favorable connew requirements never possessed by the abso-ditions, and some of the reasons for this are not lute monarchies which sprang from tribes unacquainted with any other principle than that of patriarchal government. The history of the various states which sprang up in Asia, each in its turn to be overwhelmed in a destruction which scarcely left a trace of its social influence, exhibits in a very striking manner the defects which necessarily ensue when a people ignorant of social arts attempts to form an extensive scheme of government. The various races raised to temporary power by the chances of war in the East, were, generally speaking, nomadic tribes whose habits had produced a hardihood which enabled them to conquer with ease their effeminate neighbors of the more settled districts, but whose social state was not sufficiently advanced to allow them to carry on any extended rule. Used only to their simple nomadic life, they were suddenly brought face to face with wants and

difficult to discern. The Slavs in Russia have for a long time had open to them an immense tract of thinly inhabited country, their only rivals to the possession of which were the Finnish tribes of the north. Now the village community is a form peculiarly adapted for colonization, and this process of colonizing fresh country by sending out detachments from over-grown villages seems to have gone on for a long time in Russia; so that the communities which still exist there present a com. plete network of relationship to each other, every village having some "mother-village' from which it has sprung.* Having thus a practically boundless territory for their settlement, none of those difficulties in obtaining land which led to the decay of the village in

The same connection between "mother" and daughter" villages also existed to a large extenf in Germany.

western Europe affected the Russians in their peaceful tribes; for war requires, more than earlier history. With the Teutons the village any other pursuit, that it should be conducted had a somewhat different history. It is diffi- by an individual will. Among the peacefu cult to determine exactly to what extent it ex- inhabitants of India or Russia the village isted among them; but traces of its organiza- head-man was generally some aged and vention are still discoverable among the laws and erable father exercising a sort of paternal incustoms of Germany and England. The fluence over the others through the reverence warlike habits of the German tribes, however, paid to his age and wisdom. With the Teutons, soon produced a marked effect on its organiz- however, their habits gave an excessive imation. The chief of the village, whether hered-portance to the strength and vigor of manitary or elective, was generally pos essed of hood, and they learnt to regard those who exbut little power. Among a warlike people, hibited the greatest skill in battle as their however, the necessity for a captain or dicta- natural chieftains. tor must have been much greater than with

THE DAWN OF HISTORY:

An Introduction to Pre-historic Study.

EDITED BY C. F. KEARY, M.A., OF THE BRITISH MUSEUM.

IN TWO PARTS-PART TWO.

CHAPTER VIII.

RELIGION

but caused the "ir visible things to be shown by those that do as pear.' And even in the darkest ages and among the least favored races, there were a. ways to be found some minds that vibrated, however feebly, to the 139. We nave hitherto been occupied in suggestions of this teaching, and shaped out tracing the growth of inventions which had for themselves and their tribe some conception for their end the supply of material wants, or of a Divine Ruler and His g vernment of the the ordering of conditions which should en-world from those works of His hands of which able men to live peaceably together in companies, and defend the products of their labor from the attacks of rival tribes and neighbors. A very little research into the relics of antiquity, however, brings another side of human thought before us, and we discover, whether by following the revelations of language or by examining into the traces left in ancient sites, abundant proof to show that the material wants of life did not alone occupy the thoughts of our remote ancestors any more than our own, and that even while the struggle for life was fiercest, conjectures about the unseen world and the life beyond the grave, and aspirations toward the invisible source of life and light they felt to be around them, occupied a large space in their minds. God did not leave them without witness at any time,

their senses told them. Before commerce, or writing, or law had advanced beyond their earliest beginnings, religious rites and funeral rites had no doubt been established in every tribe, and men's thoughts about God and His relationship to His creatures had found some verbal expression, some sort of creed in which they could be handed down from father to son and form a new tie to bind men together. The task of tracing back these rites and creeds to their earliest shape is manifestly harder than that of tracing material inventions, or laws between man and man, to their first germs, for we are here trenching on some of the deepest questions which the human mind is capable of contemplating-nothing less indeed than the nature of conscience and the dealings of God Himself with the souls of

His creatures. We must therefore tread cautiously, be content to leave a great deal uncertain, and, making up our minds only on such points as appear to be decided by revelation, accept on others the results of present researches as still imperfect, and liable to be modified as further light on the difficult problems in consideration is obtained.

140. The study of language has perhaps done more than anything else to clear away the puzzles which mythologies formerly presented to students. It has helped in two ways: first, by tracing the names of objects of worship to their root-forms, and thus showing their meaning and revealing the thought which lay at the root of the worship. Secondly, by proving the identity between the gods of different nations, whose names, apparently different, have been resolved into the same root-word, or to a root of the same meaning, when the alchemy of philological research was applied to them.

and Isis as heroines of pathetic histories, our thoughts as we read are busied in tracing ali that is said about them to the aspects of the sun's march across the heavens, through the vicissitudes of a bright and thundery eastern, or a gusty northern, day, and the tenderly glowing and fading colors of the western sky into which he sinks when his course is run.

142. Our first feeling in receiving this simple explanation of the puzzling old stories is rather one of disappointment than of satisfaction; we feel that we are losing a great deal-not the interest of the stories only, but all those glimpses of deep moral meanings, of yearnings after divine teachers and rulers, of acknowledgment of the possibility of communion between God and man, which we had hitherto found in them, and which we are sure that the original makers of them could not have been without. It seems to rob the old religions of the essence of religion-spirituality-and reduce them to mere observations of natural phenomena, due rather to the bodily senses than to any instincts or necessities of the soul. But here the science of language, with which we were about to quarrel as having robbed us, comes in to restore to the old beliefs those very elements of mystery, awe, and yearning toward the invisible, which we were fearing to see vanish away. As is "sually the case on looking deeper, we shall find that the explanation which seemed at first to impoverish, really enhances the beauty and worth of the subject brought into clearer light. It teaches us to see something more in what we have been used to call mere nature-worship than appears at first sight.

141. The discovery of a closer relationship than had been formerly suspected between the mythologies of various nations is a very important one, as it enables us to trace the growth of the stories told of gods and heroes, from what may be called the grown-up form in which we first become acquainted with them in the religious systems of the Greeks, Romans, and Scandinavians, to the primitive shape in which the same creeds were held by the more metaphysical and less imaginative Eastern people among whom they originally sprang up. In some respects this task of tracing back the poetical myths of Greek and Northern poets, to the simpler, if grander, beliefs of the ancient Egyptians and Hindus is not unlike our search in a perfected lan- 143. When we were considering the beginguage for its earliest roots. We lose shape- nings of language, we learned that all rootliness and beauty as we come back, but we words were expressions of sensations received find the form that explains the birth of the from outward things, every name or word thought, and lets us see how it grew in the being a description of some bodily feeling, a minds of men. One chief result arrived at gathering-up of impressions on the senses by this comparison of creeds, and by unrav- made by the universe outside us. With this elling the meaning of the names of ancient stock of words-pictorial words we may call gods and heroes, is the discovery that a wor-them-it is easy to see that when people in ship of different aspects and forces of nature lies at the bottom of all mythologies, and that the cause of the resemblance between the stories told of the gods and heroes (a resemblance which strikes us as soon as we read two or three of them together) is, that they are in reality only slightly different ways of describing natural appearances according to the effect produced on different minds, or to the variations of climate and season of the year. Having once got the key of the enigma in our hands, we soon become expert in hunting the parable through all the protean shapes in which it is presented to us. The beroes of the old stories we have long loved begin to lose their individuality and character for us. And instead of thinking of Apollo, and Osiris, and Theseus, and Herakles and Thor, as separate idealizations of heroic or godlike character; of Ariadne, and Idun,

early times wanted to express a mental feeling, they were driven to use the word which expressed the sensation in their bodies most nearly corresponding to it. We do something of the same kind now when we talk of warm love, chill fear, hungry avarice, and dark tevenge-mixing up words for sensations of the body to heighten the expression of emotions of the mind. In using these expressions we are conscious of speaking allegorically, and we have, over and above our allegorical phrases, words set aside especially for describing mental actions, so that we can talk of the sensations of our bodies and of our minds without any danger of confounding them together. But in early times, before words had acquired these varied and enlarged meanings, when men had only one word by which to express the glow of the body when the sun shone and the glow of the mind when a friend

145. The chief objects of nature-worship must obviously be the same, or nearly the same, in every part of the world, so that even among different races, living far apart, and having no connection with each other, a certain similarity in the stories told about gods and heroes, and in the names and titles given to them, is observable. The sun, the moon, the sky, the sea, the river, sunshine and darkness, night and day, summer and winter

was near; the difficulty of speaking, or even | could well hold. That they followed this thinking, of mental and bodily emotions apart course with their religious ceremonies and in from each other must have been very great their manner of representing their gods, is Only gradually could the two things have be- perhaps fortunate for us, as it enables us to come disentangled from one another, and trace with greater ease the particular aspect during all the time while this change was go- of nature, and the mental sensation or moral ing on an allegorical way of speaking of men- lesson identified with it, which each one of tal emotions and of the source of mental emo- their gods and goddesses embodies. We tions must have prevailed. It is not difficult have the rude primitive form embodying an to see that while love and warmth, fear and aspect or force of nature, and instead of a cold, had only one word to express them, the beautiful confusing story, merely for the sun, the source of warmth, and God, the most part titles, addresses, and prayers, source of love, were spoken of in much the whose purport more or less reveals the spiritsame terms, and worshiped in songs that ex-ual meaning which that aspect of nature pressed the same adoration and gratitude. It conveyed to the worshiper. follows, therefore, that while we acknowledge the large proportion in which the nature element comes into all mythologies, we need not look upon the worshipers of nature as worshipers of visible things only. They felt, without being able to express, the Divine cause which lay behind the objects whose grandeur and beauty appealed to their wonder, and they loved and worshiped the Unseen while naming the seen only. As time passed on and language developed, losing much of its original significance, there was, especially among the Greeks and Romans, a gradual divergence between the popular beliefs about the gods and the spirit of true worship which originally lay behind them. People no longer felt the influence of nature in the double method in which it had come to them in the childhood of the race, and they began to distinguish clearly between their bodies and their minds, between the things that lay without and the emotions stirred within Then the old nature beliefs became degraded to foolish and gross superstitions, and the yearning soul sought God in a more eternal way.

these objects and changes must always make the staple, the back-bone so to speak, round which all mythological stories founded on nature-worship are grouped. But climate and scenery, especially any striking peculiarity in the natural features of a country, have a strong influence in modifying the impressions made by these objects on the imaginations of the dwellers in the land, and so giving a special form or color to the national creed, bringing perhaps some divine attribute or some more haunting impression of the condition of the soul after death, into a prominence unknown elsewhere. The religion of the ancient Egyptians was distinguished from that of other nations by several such characteristics, and in endeavoring to understand them we must first recall what there is distinctive in the climate and scenery of Egypt to our minds.

144. The mythologies of the different Aryan nations are those which concern us most nearly, entering as they do into the very composition of our language, and coloring not only our litera ure and poetry, but our 146. The land of Egypt is, let us remembaby-songs and the tales told in our nurse-ber, a delta-shaped valley, broad at its northries. We shall find it interesting to compare together the various forms of the stories told by nations of the Aryan stock, and to trace them back to their earliest shape. But before entering on this task it may be well to turn our attention for a little while to a still earlier mythology, where the mingling of metaphysical conceptions with the worship of natural phenomena is perhaps more clearly shown than in any other, and which may therefore serve as a guide to help us in grasp ing this connection in the more highly colored, picturesque stories we shall be hereafter attempting to unravel. This earliest and least ornamented mythology is that of the ancient Egyptians, a people who were always disposed to retain primitive forms unchanged, even when, as was the case with their hieroglyphics, they had to use them to express more developed thoughts than the forms

ern extremity and gradually narrowing between two ranges of cliffs till it becomes through a great part of its length a mere strip of cultivatable land closely shut in on each side. Its sky overhead is always blue, and from morning till evening intensely bright, flecked only occasionally, and here and there, by thin gauzy clouds, so that the sun's course, from the first upshooting of his keen arrowy rays over the low eastern hills to his last solemn sinking in a pomp of glorious color behind the white cliffs in the west, can be traced unimpeded day after day through the entire course of the year. Beyond the cliffs which receive the sun's first and last greeting, stretches a boundless waste-the silent, dead, sunlit desert, which no one had ever traversed, which led no one knew where, from whose dread, devouring space the sun escaped triumphant each morning, and back