RELIGION AND THE ENVIRONMENT. 21 



dependent personalities. Thus the early scientific investigators, as 

 Anaxagoras and Pannenides, necessarily broke with polytheism, and 

 proclaimed the essential oneness of that power from which all came. 

 Men of philosophic spirit everywhere, whether in India, Egypt, China, 

 or Rome, have pressed behind the confusing throng of pagan panthe- 

 ons, to reach some elder, more eternal, more majestic, and absolute 

 power behind them all. Nutar = the power ; Tao = the eternal prin- 

 ciple ; Akevana Zarvana = boundless time ; Brahma = the supernatural 

 essence of all. The questions, " Whence has all come ? What is the 

 source of all ? " have become more and more urgent. One after an- 

 other, the idols of ancient belief have been broken by the iconoclastic 

 hammer of fuller knowledge, and the yearning arms of faith, that 

 must embrace some adored object, have reached up to purer concep- 

 tions of the divine, more worthy of worship. 



Or when, on the contrary, civilization is decaying, and the incur- 

 sions and conquests of barbarians are, from century to century, making 

 society coarser and rougher, as happened in Europe from the fifth to 

 the tenth century, then we see a corresponding degeneration in re- 

 ligion. 



How lofty and pure the spiritual truths that Jesus taught ! And, 

 in the simple, ingenuous narratives of the gospel, what an anchor to 

 the Christian Church to keep it, one would think, from ever drifting 

 far away from its original place ! And yet, what melancholy degrada- 

 tion, what gross perversions, did Christianity lapse into among the 

 dissolute Greeks and Romans, the rude Franks and Vandals ! As we 

 study mediaeval Christianity, with its belief in witchcraft and all sorts 

 of pious and impious magic ; its melancholy asceticism ; the gross wor- 

 ship of saints, relics, and images, and deifications of Virgin and eucha- 

 ristic bread and wine ; with its martial, steel-clad bishops, ready to fight 

 in public as in private ; with its exaltation of ceremony above morality, 

 and investment of priest and pope with supernatural power and au- 

 thority — it seems almost incredible that the glad-tidings of the gospel, 

 the simple faith that started as a message of peace on earth and good- 

 will to men, could ever have been transformed into this. It is only 

 by the irresistible influence of a corrupt society in the first place, and, 

 secondly, of a barbarous society, that it is at all explainable. 



The first forms of religion have well been called a kind of primi- 

 tive philosophy. So, full-fledged philosophy has been the constant 

 pioneer of a purer theology, and the diverse speculations of the intel- 

 lect, from the days of Ptah-hotep and Lao-Tsee down to those of Hegel 

 and Cousin, have been prominent forces in giving pious hearts their 

 special directions in the religious field. According as the metaphysics 

 of a people varies — following the empiric or the intuitive, the positive 

 or the idealistic type — so will its religion vary. See, e. g., what a dif- 

 ferent thing Buddhism developed into among the nation of positivists, 

 the Chinese, from the form it took among the idealistic Brahmans. 



