European mythologies can explain the general preservation of the name in the one case and the universal loss of it in the other. But now we come back to the Nature-worship theory, and ask, What does such a worship mean? The Nature is now limited-excludes Earth. The worshippers turned to Heaven. But it does not follow that because they named God Heaven, they thought Heaven God. It is, perhaps, no longer possible to us to personalize Heaven, but it might have been as impossible to the primitive Indo-European to conceive it as impersonal. The belief difficult to the philosophic man is easy to the imaginative child. The most natural thought to a child-like mind is, as every natural historian of religion witnesses, that Nature is animated-acts by virtue of an immanent life. The Indo-European placed the seat of this life in Heaven, worshipped no fetich or idol, but the bright resplendent Dyaus. Heaven was to him living -a being capable of feeling and exercising influence, to whom he prayed and offered sacrifices. That primitive man knew what obedience was, strove to shape his life in such a fashion as Heaven might approve, termed the being he worshipped up there Bhaga, the Distributor or the Adorable.* He had not learned to localize the * The original meaning of Bhaga seems uncertain. Bopp ("Compar. Gram.," p. 1217, note) and Pictet ("Les Origines Indo-Europ.," ii. 654) derive it from a root signifying to worship, to adore, to love; hence deity upon earth, and hence had no temple-to fear him, and hence had no priest." The home, or the meadow, or the shadow of a giant oak, like that which stood in old Dodona, or those under whose spreading branches the Germans of Tacitus gathered to worship the invisible Presence,+ was the temple, and the patriarch of the family was the priest. That worship may be termed a Nature-worship, because the one word was the name of Heaven and of God, but Nature is here only a synonym for God. The Nature was living, and the life in it was to our primitive man divine. Man had not learned to dualize his own being, nor the great being that stood around and above his own. A stranger to the philosophic thought that divides man into body and spirit, and the universe into nature and God, he realized in consciousness the unity of his own personal being, and imagined a like unity in the light and lifegiving Dyaus. The glory of the blue and brooding heaven was the glory of the immanent God. This primitive worship is also sometimes termed a personification of natural forces and objects. It depends very much on what personification means whether the explanation be true or false. Our personification is a Bhaga, the adorable being. But Fick ("Vergleich. Wörterbuch," p. 133) derives it from a root signifying to distribute. Hence Bhaga, the Distributor ("Zutheiler "). * Pictet, "Les Origines Indo-Europ.," vol. ii. p. 690. "De Germania," 9; Welcker, "Griech. Götterlehre," vol. i. p. 202. C conscious act the investing material things with the character and attributes of living beings. But in no respect whatever was primitive worship personification in this sense. The imagination was not consciously creative. There was no intentional investiture of natural objects with divine powers. That, indeed, would have implied cultured thought and developed belief. Personification involves the idea of person. If man personifies a natural object as a god, he must have the idea of God. A strict Naturalism, without belief in invisible powers, cannot personify-can create a fetich as little as a god. Hence Nature personified can only mean Nature conceived as living, as vital with creative and preservative powers. To worship Nature, or natural elements. and objects thus conceived, is to worship neither the Nature of material forces and laws known to science, nor the Nature of imaginary voices and shapes known to poetry, but the Nature known to the primitive manchild as the body and home of the immanent God. But there is one element of the Indo-European conception of God too characteristic to be overlooked-the element of Paternity. He was conceived as Father-father of man. The Indians called him Dyaushpitar. The Greeks invoked Zeû Táтep-could so little forget this essential attribute of their family deity that they transferred it to the great Olympian, Father of gods and men. The Romans blended name and character in Jupiter. The Germans, though they displaced the ancient Zio, did not forget his fatherhood,* and so loved the thought of a father-god as to make the stormful Wodin Alvater. This is, perhaps, the characteristic which most distinguishes the Indo-European from the Semitic conception of God-the parent, too, of all other differences. Neither as Monotheisms, nor as Polytheisms, do the Semitic religions attribute a fatherly, humane character to their gods. Even the Old Testament knows only an abstract ideal fatherhood, which the Hebrews as a nation realize, but the Hebrew as a man almost never does. The Semitic God dwells in inaccessible light-an awful, invisible Presence, before which man must stand uncovered, trembling; but the Indo-European God is preeminently accessible, loves familiar intercourse, is bound to man by manifold ties of kinship. The majesty of God in an exalted Monotheism, like the Hebrew, is sometimes so conceived as almost to annihilate the free agency and personal being of man; but the Indo-European, as a rule, so conceives his Deity as to allow his own freedom of action and personal existence full scope. The explanation may, perhaps, be here found of the Hebrew horror at death, almost hopeless "going down to the grave,' the often-asserted and often-denied silence of the Old Testament as to the immortality of man. So much is certain, whether the Warburtonian or the more orthodox * Grimm, "Deut. Mythol.," vol. i. 178. Ib., pp. 20, 149 f. theory be held, the doctrine of a future state occupies a less prominent and less essential place in the religion of the Old Testament than in the Indo-European religions in general.* The belief in immortality was before Christ more explicit and more general among the Greeks than among the Jews. The conception of God, in the one case, seems to have almost annihilated the conception of man; but in the other, the two conceptions were mutually complementary,—God incomplete without man, man without God. Then, while the father in the IndoEuropean religions softens the god, and gives, on the whole, a sunny and cheerful and, sometimes, festive character to the worship, the god in the Semitic annihilates the father, and gives to its worship a gloomy, severe, and cruel character, which does not indeed belong to the revealed religion of the Old Testament, but often belongs to the actual religion of the Jews.† The Indo-European loves the gay religious festival, the Semite the frequent and prolonged fast. The Semitic Polytheisms showed very early their fiercer spirit in the place they gave and the necessity they attached to human sacrifices; but the Indo-European religions, although perhaps, even in the earliest times, not altogether innocent of human sacrifices,‡ * 66 + Kalisch, "Leviticus," vol. i. pp. 381-416. Muir's "Sanskrit Texts," i. pp. 355 ff. Weber, "Ueber Menschenopfer bei den Indern der Vedischen Zeit.," Indis. Streifen, pp. 54 ff. |