390 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



vidual must be seen out-of-doors ; no dog must bark, no pig must grunt, no cock 

 must crow. ... On tbese occasions tbey tied up tlie moutbs of tbe dogs and 

 pigs, and put tbe fowls under a calabasb, or fastened a piece of cloth over their 



eyes." 



And how completely the idea of transgression was associated in the 

 mind of the Sandwich-Islander with breach of ceremonial observance, 

 is shown in the fact that " if any one made a noise on a tabu-day .... 

 he must die." Through stages considerably advanced, religion con- 

 tinues to be thus constituted. When questioning the Nicaraguans 

 concerning their creed, Oviedo, eliciting the fact that they confessed, 

 their sins to an appointed old man, asks what sort, of sins they con- 

 fessed ; and the first clause of the answer is, " We tell him when we 

 have broken our festivals and not kept them." Similarly of the Peru- 

 vians, we read that " the most notable sin was neglect in the service 

 of the huacas " (spirits, etc.) ; and a large part of life was spent in 

 propitiating the apotheosized dead. How elaborate the observances, 

 how frequent the festivals, how lavish was the expenditure, by which, 

 among the ancient Egyptians, the good-will of supernatural beings 

 was sought, the records everywhere show us ; and that with them re- 

 ligious duty consisted in thus ministering to the desires of ancestral 

 ghosts, deified in various degrees, we are shown by the prayer of Ra- 

 meses to his father Amnion, in which he claims his help in battle be- 

 cause of the many bulls he has sacrificed to him. With the Hebrews 

 in pre-Mosaic times it was the same. As Kuenen remarks', the " great 

 work and enduring merit " of Moses was that he gave dominance to 

 the moral element in religion. In his reformed creed, " Jahveh is dis- 

 tinguished from the rest of the gods in this, that he will be served, 

 not merely by sacrifices and feasts, but also, nay, in the first place, by 

 the observance of the moral commandments." That the piety of the 

 Greeks included diligent performance of rites at tombs, and that the 

 Greek god was especially angered by non-observance of propitiatory 

 ceremonies, are familiar facts ; and credit with a god was claimed by 

 the Trojan as by the Egyptian, not on account of rectitude, but on 

 account of oblations made ; as is shown by Chryses's prayer to Apollo. 

 So, too, Christianity, originally a renewed development of the ethical 

 element at the expense of the ceremonial element, losing as it spread 

 those early traits which distinguished it from lower creeds, displayed, 

 in mediaeval Europe, a relatively large amount of ceremony and a rel- 

 atively small amount of morality. Of the seventy-three chapters con- 

 stituting the Rule of St. Benedict, nine concern the moral and general 

 duties of the brothers, while thirteen concern the religious ordinances. 

 And how the idea of criminality attached to disregard of ordinances 

 is proved by the following passage from the Rule of St. Columbanus : 



" A year's penance for him who loses a consecrated wafer ; six months for 

 him who suffers it to be eaten by mites ; twenty days for him who lets it turn 



