786 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



It has been said that religions change, but worship continues 

 the same. The assertion in this shape is too absolute ; but it is 

 certain that every religion preserves in its rites and symbols sur- 

 vivals from the whole series of previous religions. And this does 

 it no harm. The important thing is, not the leather bottle, but 

 the wine that is poured out of it ; not the form, but the thought 

 that animates it and goes beyond it. "When Christians and Bud- 

 dhists respectively concentrate upon their Master the principal 

 attributes of the sun, beginning with the nimbus, the prototype 

 of which goes back to the aureoles engraved upon the Chaldean 

 monuments, they do not suppose themselves to be giving homage 

 to the star of day. They only intend, in reality, to reflect upon the 

 venerated face of their founder the symbol which has from time 

 immemorial formed an image of the celestial glory, and which 

 also, in contemporary cults, specially characterized the highest per- 

 sonification of divinity. We are reminded of the answer which a 

 father in the Church gave to those who accused the Christians of 

 celebrating the day of the sun : " We solemnize this day, not, like 

 the infidels, on account of the sun, but on account of him who 

 made the sun." Constantine went further when he composed a 

 prayer for his legions to recite on Sunday that could satisfy at 

 once, as M. V. Duruy remarks, the worshipers of Mithra, Serapis, 

 the sun, and Christ. Symbolism may ally itself with the most 

 mystic tendencies, but, like mysticism, it is a powerful auxiliary 

 of the religious sentiment against the immobility of dogma and 

 the tyranny of the letter. M. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu has shown, 

 pertinently to this point, how in Russia the conservative ritual- 

 ism of the old believers has been able, by means of the symbolical 

 interpretation of texts and ceremonies, to attain liberty of doc- 

 trines and, in certain cases, a complete rationalism, without break- 

 ing with the traditional forms of Christianity or of the Eastern 

 Church. 



There comes a time when religions which make an important 

 factor of the supernatural find themselves in conflict with the 

 progress of knowledge, and especially with a growing belief in a 

 rational order of the universe. Symbolism then offers them a way 

 of safety which they have more than once taken advantage of to 

 keep pace with their times. If we take peoples in an inferior de- 

 gree of religious development, we find them having fetiches — that 

 is, beings and objects arbitrarily invested with superhuman facul- 

 ties ; then idols, or fetiches carved into resemblance of a man or 

 an animal ; but we rarely discover symbols among them, for they 

 imply both the desire to represent the abstract by the concrete and 

 the consciousness that there is no identity between the symbol 

 and the reality for which it stands. When the mind opens to the 

 notion of abstract or invisible gods, it can preserve its veneration 



