But there were also propitiatory sacrifices required by a feeling of guilt and of dread. Here life is given for life. It seems impossible to put less meaning into such rites than that the worshipper acknowledged his
life to he forfeited, and hoped by something which not only had value but was also a living object, to avert through confession made in this way the divine wrath. Human sacrifices were still more significant. In the case of children, especially of the first-born, the suppo- sition that the first-fruits were consecrated and devoted, as an expression of gratitude, does not seem at all natu- ral. It was, in short, a sacrifice made for the benefit of the family, caused by a painful sense of ill desert; it was giving the fruit, of the body for the sin of the soul. The more general sacrifices of human beings, especially of grown-up men, which took place most frequently where some great crime had been committed by persons unknown, or when pestilence or defeat by enemies be- tokened the wrath of protecting divinities, must be re- garded as an acknowledgment of sin, and a way of transferring and appeasing divine anger. Wrath de- manded or exposed to death. The death of one or more freed the rest. In the Creek myths, the self-de- votion of an innocent virgin, like Macaria in the //< ra- clidcB of Euripides, and in Roman history more clearly the act of the two Decii, father and son, their self-con- secration, and in the case of the younger the devotion of the hostile army, point to a faith that victory might be secured by voluntary death for others. This is the highest form that human sacrifice took in heathen an- tiquity.
It remains to give the briefest possible estimate of the heathen religions in their influences on man. With regard to their lower forms, as seen in wild races, they are to a great extent religions of fear; dread of supe- rior powers weighs on the minds even of light-hearted African negroes. A feeling of sin, and yet a very faint and half- conscious one, must be presupposed in their minds in order that this dread may exist; but the dread is greatly increased by magic practices which are kept up by priestly imposture. In the higher races it would lie folly to deny that in the course of time, and partly by the help of moral sentiments which must grow up in well-ordered civil communities, the religions of paganism have been elevated in their moral tone; that under them men have more or less risen into art, freedom, philosophy; that great individual char- acters have appeared in such countries, and that toler- ably high standards of moral excellence have counter- acted depraving influences from bad religions or bad institutions. But there are some necessary evils in polytheism, owing to its very nature. They honor power rather than character, since it was divine power in objects of nature that impressed itself chiefly on the minds of men. Hence absolutism and ambition were under the protection of the religious sentiment. It was the worship of beings of limited attributes, more or less under the control of fate, who were for the most part not from eternity— not authors of the world, but parts of the world, local in their spheres of operation and func- tions. There could therefore be no universal religion. Buddhism spread because it was an atheism which abolished caste and limited transmigration, and which allowed the cultus in the countries where it travelled to continue. There was, further, a want of allegiance on the part of the worshipper to his divinity ; even rid- icule of them in the comic mimes of the Greeks was allowed, and sometimes the people treated the idols with great indignity. These religions could not resist any increase of knowledge, but gave way to scepticism, and this brought on national ruin. But the heaviest charge almost everywhere against paganism was its sensuality, not in the lower races only, but in the higher'; not so much in earlier times as at the acme of refine- ment. The mythologies were impure. The gods were depraved, and examples of wickedness. Licentiousness was put under the protection of religion. On this point a long chapter might be written; hut it is better to pass over this in silence, and to close with saying that the Apostle to the Centiles was no maligner when he wrote the first chapter of the Epistle to the Roman?.
POLYTHEISM
:--'
I'OMAUAXCIO
III. / of works
to the pagan i ' >-l> make a
selection.
I || of Pagan-
; iris, 1824 1831, 5
vols. ; II ' '■"■-■ i in Werke,
in, 1840 : \\ uttke, GtocA. A Ueiden-
• • • ols., unfinished
|j , II'. rke, pi. ii. vols. i. ii.
1857 ; Pfleiderer, jDo* Wesen d. Religion
-. N.r.il works of Max Mnllcr. as
Religion, etc.
■ r r.) From the Old
■ ••..mi- and characters, as by Vbssius, Dt : Amsterdam, 1642) : Huet, / Paris, 1672); and others of thai school, now K. Dm'. Mull iflL Afyfhologu (Gotting. 1825 ; Mas lluller in bis second course of Lectures on Language.
• Treatises on Heathen Religions Banter I Paris, 171" 1738) and Jacob Bryant, now forgotten ; Creuzer, ed. 1819
[821, I vols.), with Mone's Heidenth. • /. nordl. Europas (Leips. und Darmstadt, 1822, 1823,2 vols.); Meiners, .. h. ./. Religionen I Hanover, 1806, 1807, 2 vols.); Stuhr, Relig. Sysl rtis (Berlin, 1835-