RELIGION AND THE ENVIRONMENT. 9 



glens, or to see the bullocks slain in honor of Jupiter Tonans, the 

 Thunderer. In cold and temperate climes it is the enlivening and 

 warming sun that is loved and adored ; but, in the sultry air of the 

 tropics, the sun and the sky of day become evil and destructive dei- 

 ties, and affection is transferred to the refreshing sky of night. 



So, also, in their ideas of heaven and hell, there is a natural con- 

 trast between the faith of the man of the tropics and the man of the 

 Arctic zone. To the first, the future home of the good is some abode 

 of coolness, some garden of the Hesperides, or a breezy Olympian 

 height, and the place of punishment a place of fire. To the Ice- 

 lander, hell is the place of cold, worse far to him than fire, and heaven, 

 some comfortable hall surrounded by a hedge of flame. Again, in hot 

 climes, where the soil of the river-bottoms is deep and rich, and na- 

 ture teems with productiveness, there the gods are credited with the 

 same sensuous nature ; religious ideas are apt to revolve about the 

 mysteries of procreation, and the worship of the people is apt to in- 

 clude not a few impure rites and symbols. 



The numerous gods of fertility among the agricultural Egyptians 

 — Chem, Min, Chnam, Osiris — the sexual rites of Babylonia, and the 

 numerous objectional symbols in Hindoo worship, illustrate this. On 

 the contrary, under the clear skies and bright moon and the pure 

 streamlets of Greece, it is the virgin goddesses of the most exacting 

 purity, Dianas and Pallas Athenes, rather than loose-zoned and wanton 

 mistresses, that are suggested. Aphrodite and Cybele, and Dionysos 

 indeed, were, later, members of the Olympian court ; but they came 

 from regions farther east, where they were tinged with an earthly and 

 sensuous dye, such as we do not find in the native worship of Hellas. 



The tribes of Northern Asia, wandering amid the bleak wastes of 

 Mongolia or the gloomy forests of the Ural, their frail shelter shaken 

 by the riotous winds, whose mysterious sighs and bowlings often make 

 them quake with terror, come naturally to be believers in dim, mys- 

 terious, supernatural powers, with which their own lot is bound up, 

 and readily devote themselves to whatever occult and magic rites the 

 shaman may produce. The Shemite, on the broad plains of Chaldea 

 or the sandy wastes of Arabia, found nothing to arrest his eyes till they 

 rested on the glistening skies, brilliant, in that clear air, with a brill- 

 iancy beyond anything that we know : and he became thus, most natu- 

 rally, a devout star - worshiper ; invested the chief celestial objects 

 with the most exalted attributes, and raised them, in his fervid ado- 

 ration, to more and more absolute majesty and incomparable power, 

 till at length the idea of the divine was exalted into monotheism. 



The Aryan, on the contrary, grew up among the mountain pastures 

 of Bactria, where the clouds are often about his feet, and the heavens 

 are not so far away. The earliest Vedic hymns are marked by a sense 

 of the nearness of the gods, and men are seen mingling with them, 

 familiarly, as friends. Nature did not oppress man with dreadful 



