i 3 2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



be pleased, soothed, flattered, and this very often in a number of hide- 

 ous ways. We have too many such religions, even among races of great 

 cultivation. Men change their religions more slowly than they change 

 any thing else ; and accordingly we have religions " of the ages " (it 

 is Mr. Jowett who so calls them) of the " ages before morality; " of 

 ages of which the civil life, the common maxims, and all the secular 

 thoughts, have long been dead. "Every reader of the classics," said 

 Dr. Johnson, " finds their mythology tedious." In that old world, 

 which is so like our modern world in so many things, so much more 

 like than many far more recent, or some that live beside us, there is a 

 part in which we seem to have no kindred, which we stare at, of which 

 we cannot think how it could be credible, or how it came to be thought 

 of. This is the archaic part of that very world which we look at as 

 so ancient; an " antiquity" which descended to them, hardly altered, 

 perhaps, from times long antecedent, which were as unintelligible to 

 them as to us, or more so. How this terrible religion for such it was 

 in all living detail, though we make, and the ancients then made, an 

 artistic use of the more attractive bits of it weighed on man, the 

 great poem of Lucretius, the most of a nineteenth-century poem of any 

 in antiquity, brings before us with a feeling so vivid as to be almost a 

 feeling of our own. Yet the classical religion is a mild and tender 

 specimen of the preserved religions. To get at the worst, you should 

 look where the destroying competition has been least at America, 

 where sectional civilization was rare, and a pervading coercive civiliza- 

 tion did not exist; at such religions as those of the Aztecs. 



At first sight it seems impossible to imagine what conceivable func- 

 tion such awful religions can perform in the economy of the world. 

 And no one can fully explain them. But one use they assuredly had : 

 they fixed the yoke of custom thoroughly on mankind. They were 

 the prime agents of the era. They put upon a fixed law a sanction so 

 fearful that no one could dream of not conforming to it. 



No one will ever comprehend the arrested civilizations unless he 

 sees the strict dilemma of early society. Either men had no law at 

 all, and lived in confused tribes, hardly hanging together, or they had 

 to obtain a fixed law by processes of incredible difficulty. Those who 

 surmounted that difficulty soon destroyed all those that lay in their 

 way who did not. And then they themselves were caught in their 

 own yoke. The customary discipline, which could only be imposed on 

 any early men by terrible sanctions, continued with those sanctions, 

 and killed out of the whole society the propensities to variation which 

 are the principle of progress. 



Experience shows how incredibly difficult it is to get men really to 

 encourage the principle of originality. They will admit it in theory, 

 but in practice the old error the error which arrested a hundred civil- 

 izations returns again. Men are too fond of their own life, too cred- 

 ulous of the completeness of their own ideas, too angry at the pain of 



