LECTURE V.

STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT THE ETHICAL RELIGIONS.

We shall now proceed to discuss the most highly developed religions, those we have called the ethicalspiritualistic revelation-religions, or more briefly the ethical religions, on the grounds already explained. I call them spiritualistic because they are sometimes characterised by spiritualism carried to an extreme; revelation-religions because the idea of revelation has now attained perfect clearness and maturity, and because a special revelation vouchsafed by the deity once for all, and recorded in sacred writ, forms the foundation on which the religion rests; but, above all, ethical, because, arising out of an ethical awakening, they aim at a more or less lofty ethical ideal, an ideal no longer merely co-ordinated with religion, but conceived as God's own will, and an emanation of His being—or in more abstract philosophical language, an ideal objectivised in, and projected into

the conception of God. I have also had occasion to point out that the transition from the nature-religions to the ethical does not proceed so regularly as the transition from the lower to the higher nature-religions, or from the animistic-polydæmonistic to the ordered polytheistic, but is invariably accomplished by means of a designed reformation, or sometimes even by a revolution. All this must now be further explained and illustrated.

Let us first say a word about the religions which may be considered to have attained this pitch of development. About some of them there can be no doubt. I need only mention Judaism, sprung from the Mosaic community, founded upon the sacred Thora, the law revealed to Moses by God himself, and upon the preaching of the inspired prophets; or the Brahmanic community with its Veda as a book of revelation, comprising the whole divine science of redemption, infinite and eternal, not imagined, but actually seen by the ancient bards; or Confucianism, which reveres Kong-tse, the great sage of China, as its founder, and possesses its sacred writ in the five Kings, or canonical books, and the four Shu, or classical books, of which the last-named emanated from the school of Kong; or Islâm with its Korân, recording the revelations made by Allah to Mohammed, greatest of all his prophets; or various other religious communities which sprang up in later ages, chiefly in

India and Persia, and which cannot exactly be identified with Brahmanism, Buddhism, or Mohammedanism, although founded partly on one of these religions and partly on Christianity. The question whether Taoism, the other great Chinese religion, can be deemed an ethical religion has yet to undergo an investigation for which I do not consider myself qualified; but judg ing from its historical development I suspect that it has no such claim. For, although it appeals to Lao-tse, the other great Chinese sage, an older contemporary of Kong, and highly revered but not followed by the latter, and to his Tao-te-King, the book of the Way and the Virtue, as a sacred writ, I fear that it can just as little claim such a title as it is possible to find relationship between the silly superstitions and dreary magic arts in which it delights, and the gloomy but profound speculations of the master. On the other hand, the religion of Zarathushtra, which prevailed in the Iranian lands during the ancient Persian domination of the Achæmenides, in the Parthian kingdom of the Arsacides, and the medieval Persian dominion of the Sâsânides, certainly belongs, in my opinion, to the ethical religions; and it is a mystery to me how Professor von Siebeck can rank it among the higher nature-religions, which he terms morality-religions. None of the characteristics of a spiritualisticethical revelation-religion are lacking here. Although it is a moot-point whether Zarathushtra was a his

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torical or a mythical personage-and there are high authorities on the subject of Iranian antiquity and historians of repute who maintain the former-it is certain that, although he belongs to a legendary period and is extolled as a supernatural being, he constitutes the concrete summary, or the eponym, of a definite reformation effected by the promulgation of a new and systematic doctrine. This doctrine, at once religious and social, was essentially ethical. For the roving life of predatory hordes there was now to be substituted the settled life of husbandmen and herdsmen; the Daêva worship of the former was to be succeeded by that of higher beings, who, no longer as naturegods, ruled over nature, and who demanded, hallowed, and protected purity, vigilance, and industry. These beings, as I have already indicated, who were at first little more than shadowy personifications of abstract ideas, were regarded as the vassals and servants of a real god, the all-wise Lord, Ahura Mazda, neither born nor created like them, and far exalted above them. If, at a later period, when the new religion had spread among tribes and classes which clung to their ancestral cult, several of the antiquated gods and rituals were revived, they were subordinated to Ahura Mazda, or transformed from gods into Zarathushtrian Yazatas, while their service was conformed with the orthodox doctrine. Many a Christian, a Buddhist, and Mohammedan saint owes his origin to a similar process. The

ancient worship of Fire was maintained, but now on the ground that it was of heavenly origin, and truly the spirit of Ahura Mazda himself. Nor was a sacred writ lacking. The Avesta, which we still possess, contains the sadly meagre, but in part the earliest fragments of a religious literature which, according to both indigenous and Greek tradition, was of great extent, and, as being the record of divine revelation, was preserved by order of government in two authentic copies, but was lost when Persia was conquered by Alexander the Great. To this day, among the Parsees of India and the inhabitants of several districts of Persia, who compare favourably with other Orientals in industry, honesty, and cleanliness, the Zarathushtrian religion still survives, bearing venerable testimony to one of the noblest religious-ethical movements recorded by ancient history.

You are perhaps surprised that I have not yet mentioned the two greatest religions in the world, and the most widely diffused of all-Buddhism and Christianity. What position is to be assigned to these two in the classification is a matter of keen controversy. Professor Whitney had no hesitation on the subject. He naturally placed them in the category of "religions proceeding from an individual founder," or practically the same class which I prefer to call ethical. "Of this origin," he says, "are Zoroastrism, Mohammedanism, Buddhism; and from the point of view of the general