CHAPTER V

WHENCE CAME RELIGION TO MAN?

What has Mr. Wells to say on the origin of religion in matters less than, but connected with, the Idea of God; for instance, Sacrifice, Worship, the Future Life? I leave Priesthood to a later discussion, in the place where Mr. Wells himself deals with it.

I take for my text a sentence drawn from his own work, page 67:

“_Fetichism is only incorrect science based on guesswork or false analogy._”

That sentence is an accurate and exhaustive summary of what Mr. Wells has to tell us on the origin of religion. It is exactly that. It is “incorrect science based on guesswork or false analogy.”

I have said that the origin of all the errors which he copies from his predecessors of half a lifetime ago is the neglect of the obvious fact that _Man is a fixed type_. It is the point I so emphasized in my last chapter, because it is capital to the whole discussion.

If you pretend, or try to believe, that Man alone, out of all creation, is not a definable being, but in a ceaseless process of rapid change, then, of course, you can invent at will any mythology to account for anything you prefer to hope happened to him in the past. You can imagine any monstrous lack of human faculty in the past so as to make your facts fit in with your theory. But if you regard Man as Man, since the time when first True Man (Mr. Wells’s own term) appeared upon earth; if you regard palæolithic man as Man, a known animal, just as you regard the palæolithic reindeer as a reindeer; if you consider a known thing called “Man” and not a succession of imaginary beings made up as you go along, then you have three certain guides to go upon, to wit: (1) your own knowledge of your own self, (2) your knowledge of your fellow-beings, (3) the record of Man’s actions and being since he has kept records.

Let us first see what are the accompaniments of religion in the human mind, and how they tend to work in the fallen nature of man.

What is the _known_ way in which the human mind proceeds in its religious activities?

Those activities are all connected together by being each of them dependent on the original Idea of God.

If God be, then these religious practices—sacrifices, sacraments, prayers, awe, the sanctity of special deeds, places, and things, restrictions, rituals, _Fas et nefas_—are more or less consonant to that Supreme Reality. However perverted, each religious action will, _if there be indeed a Creator and Sustainer_, correspond to and resemble what might have been an _un_perverted action of the same kind; and that _un_perverted religious action would be an action in exact tune with reality. The perverted Sacrament argues a true Sacrament; the perverted Sacrifice a true form of Sacrifice, and in general the perverted Worship a true Worship.

If God be not, then Sacrifice, Sacrament, Prayer, Inhibition, Ritual, are even worse perversions than the original illusion of a God from which they all derive.

These main religious functions I have just put down by their popular names. Let me give them a more exact order. They are, first of all, Veneration; next, the offerings of gratitude and propitiation, that is Sacrifice; next, the Communion of the Human Spirit with God, that is Prayer; next, a recognition of Being, spiritual and incorporeal, which involves the possibility of man’s surviving death; next, Ritual—the necessary human framework of any continuous human Veneration, Sacrifice, Prayer, or affirmation of Immortality.

The Veneration natural to That which made us and by which we are, That which overshadows all possible things (including ourselves), produces a multitude of results: love quite as much as fear or wonder; a vast curiosity and search; and, above all, the ineradicable desire to _worship_—that is, to put up monuments (within the limits of our powers) bearing testimony to our Veneration; to perform acts consonant with that Veneration; to ask for aid, to admit wrongdoing, to expect justice in social relations, to enforce it, and so forth.

That, I say, is the very first action of the human mind, as we know it, where the conception of the Divine comes into its action: _worship_.

There is no race of men whatsoever, even where it has lost the conception of the Universal God, or has let that conception become obscure and indifferent, which does not still preserve the derivatives from the original idea of God. Treat the simplest savage with gross injustice, and you will soon see what he has to say to you: it will be of exactly the same sort as what the most corrupt of Londoners or Parisians would have to say to you. Propose that there is no ultimate vengeance for injustice, and you will discover despair in those who admit such a doctrine. You will find those who deny God—and those who find the Universe unjust are deniers of God—to be in despair, and you will find this despair showing just as clearly in the most corrupt Parisian or Londoner as you would in the most candid savage. Yet with this difference, that the savage is much less likely to accept such a proposition than the worn-out dregs of a luxurious civilization are likely to accept it.

Now on this chapter of Veneration—which must of necessity come first in order, and which we know does in practice, to our own human minds, come first in order—Mr. Wells has nothing to say.

He, or rather those from whom he got his mythology, have plenty to say of a base fear at the origin of religion, but nothing of Veneration.

Men feel Veneration in varying degrees, just as they feel colour or music in varying degrees; but it is not for those who feel it least to teach those who feel it normally and fully. It is not for the man almost colour-blind to instruct the average man on colour; it is not for a man almost tone-deaf to instruct you and me on the insufficiency of music. Mr. Wells does not apparently feel Veneration—even for great things near at hand, let alone for his Maker—at all.

Next to Veneration as a religious function proceeding from the Idea of God comes Sacrifice. If you will look at your own mind and see how the idea of Sacrifice arises in it you will discover that there is in that suggestion essentially the motive of offering a gift; _after_ that (not before it) there may also be a motive of propitiation. There may also come a motive, perhaps, sooner or later, of direct ritual connection between cause and effect: the feeling that a Sacrifice made by you will have a spiritual result. At any rate, the main motive is certainly _offering_. It is so with Sacrifice made for the sake of human beings whom we love or venerate. Still more is it so with Sacrifice to and for the Supreme Power: “I owe you all things: so take back this, yours though it is, in gratitude.”

Now, this is a noble and generous emotion; why in Mr. Wells’s account do we only hear of its perversions and especially of its beastliest perversions? The very primitive races among us enjoy that very feeling of owing gratitude; we enjoy it in the full light of revelation. Many men continue to sacrifice all day long. The better they are, the more they do it. It is an essential factor in religion, subsidiary to and derivative from the Idea of God.

Now let us proceed to the survival of man after death. It is not true that all primitive men everywhere have been (or are) equally conscious of survival after death and of the immortality of the human spirit. It is still less true to-day that all men in our refined and fatigued civilization are conscious of it. But it is true that some consciousness of it is almost universal in unspoilt men, and that, wherever it exists, it is accompanied by certain natural and almost necessary acts. We find these acts, on examining our own emotions, to be often rather symbolic than positively religious; but they are intricately bound up—whether symbolic (such as putting flowers on a grave or objects into it) or actively religious (such as prayers for and to the dead)—with the conception of survival.

If you find that a particular set of men bury their dead with care, deposit with them loved or valuable objects, or objects with which their lives were associated, or even sink to the superstition of sacrificing companions to accompany them into the other world, you may be certain that these people believed in the survival of man.

Here again I repeat that warning which I have brought in over and over again in these notes. We must distinguish between what is evidence for truth and what is evidence only of human mood. We Christians may argue from philosophy upon the survival of the soul, or we may argue from authority upon it; and we shall triumph in that argument, for we have all the trumps in our hands. We may, and I hope, do, accept Immortality simply on faith, as a truth which the Church teaches; and we affirm it equally strongly whether we _feel_ it little or much; for the Faith is the best ground for certitude. But we are not here concerned with either of these processes, Faith or mood. We are not here concerned with whether man be right or wrong in generally accepting survival after death; we are concerned only with the value of Mr. Wells as a would be historian when he tells us that man has not accepted the idea.

I am not examining whether primitive man was right or wrong in this or that religious practice, or even in his acceptance of God. I am asking, Did he, in point of fact, act as Mr. Wells says he acted? If a materialist seeks to upset my faith in the Catholic dogma of Immortality by philosophical argument, he may be formidable in his assault on that ground. But if he produces the _historical_ argument, and says that my forefathers did not believe in their own survival, I must test his statement. If he prove to be quite wrong in his affirmation, then he ceases to be a formidable opponent in that respect: as an _historian_ he is, on that prime matter, worthless.

Let us see how our Author deals with very early palæolithic sepulture.

Here Mr. Wells depends for his views directly upon Morillet, one of the great founders of modern archæology. Morillet laid it down (in a book dating from 1883) that palæolithic man was without religion, and only came to religion by a gradual exercise of invention: by an increasing illusion. Morillet based that negation of his _on the supposed fact (accepted in 1883) that there were no palæolithic tombs_. Mr. Wells knows that since 1883 those tombs have been discovered, but he is too rootedly conservative to admit the effect of the evidence. He is still a devoted pupil of Morillet, forty-two years after his master—it is a terribly long time for a man to cling to the superstitions of his youth!

As palæolithic sepulture _has_ been discovered since Morillet—and objects buried with the dead—instead of modifying his old-fashioned error, Mr. Wells begins forcing new facts to fit exploded theory. He tells us (on p. 68) that men buried the dead with ornaments and little domestic sanctities of food and arms, not because men loved the dead, and could not be rid of the idea of their spirit carrying on, but because “they doubted they were dead”! He makes it very clear what he means by this. He means that men doubted whether the actual physical body were dead or no! He adds that this “is just as reasonable to suppose” as that men showed by such burial offerings an idea of Immortality!

Well, to such a knock-down sentence as that one can only have one answer: It is nonsense. It is not “just as reasonable” to suppose that a man didn’t know a corrupting carcase to be dead. It is wildly _un_reasonable to suppose that man would carefully bury his fellow-man in a carefully made tomb, deposit with him objects that showed great toil in their making, and were, therefore, a sacrifice of value, and at the same time did not know that he was physically dead. That such nonsense can be talked at all is the best proof that, rather than give up a false theory, men will do anything with facts. It is exactly of a piece with the Bible Christian naturalists and geologists of the mid-nineteenth century, who said that fossils were freakish tricks to try their faith in the literal interpretation of Genesis. It is False Faith afraid to reason.

It is the very mark of False Faith that it fights shy of reason. So did the Bible Christian of the Victorian Age, who would not face geological science. So does his immediate lineal descendant, Mr. Wells.

When a False Faith is challenged by awkward facts it suppresses, denies, or distorts them. The facts have got to fit the dogma.

Materialistic Faith is at this warping of scientific truth perpetually—and nowhere more than in Mr. Wells’s book.

If I thought this straining, ignoring, and twisting of ascertained fact—that is, of true science—to be an insincere trick in Mr. Wells, I would call it that. But I do not think it is. I think it is the unconscious action of a man untrained to clear thinking.

Take, for example, his attitude towards the known facts with regard to palæolithic man, so far as they regard the origin of religion in departments other than burial. Palæolithic man made the pictures everyone has heard of in the depths of the caves and elsewhere. Mr. Wells remarks on page 68 that “one sees no scope in such a life” (that of the palæolithic hunter) “for superstition or speculation.”

Why on earth not? Are superstition and speculation absent from wild hunters as we know them to-day? Would they be absent from us if we turned to wild hunting again? Why should they be?

The only answer is that common sense and plain fact must not be admitted, because they would interfere with a preconceived theory that religion was an illusion coming late in the human story. The palæolithic hunter must be free from the taint of religion. The religious illusion must come far on in the development in order that it may be associated at its origin with ritual murder and known savage customs. Yet the same writer is perpetually telling us that religious ideas are of bestial origin and came from the brutal cruelty to females and young of an aged monkey-like fellow myriads of years before the palæolithic hunters existed.

There is here a complete lack of consecutive thought. Religion began long before men were men, says Mr. Wells; yet there is no trace of it when men first _were_ men! And then again (in a separate and contradictory proposition) religion began, very late, with the neolithic culture.

But indeed in his necessity for forcing facts to fit theory he makes a hash of palæolithic man from beginning to end. We have seen in how extraordinary a fashion he stretches fact to fit theory in the matter of palæolithic burial. Let us see now how he stretches it to fit theory in the matter of palæolithic art.

Mr. Wells says, on page 53, of the men who made the cave drawings (palæolithic men), that they “drew with increasing skill as the centuries passed.” He says that because he thinks they _ought_ to have done so according to all the Darwinian dogma of slow, minute, mechanical evolution. The plain fact is that they did _not_. Their painting followed a cycle precisely like that which the painting of higher cultures has followed: it sprang suddenly, or very rapidly, into existence as a vivid, intense realization of the thing drawn. It sank into mere convention and then disappeared.

The more I look into Mr. Wells’s book, the more I find this characteristic straining of facts to meet a mythological doctrine and neglect of facts (or, to be more charitable, ignorance of facts) which might upset theory.

Thus, I find, on page 47, “with regard to the cave drawings there is scarcely anything we can suppose to be a religious or mystical symbol at all,” and he argues throughout this page that the cave drawings had no religious signification.

There are only two possible explanations of so strange a remark. One is that Mr. Wells knew the evidence and suppressed it. The other is the much more probable one, that his reading is too slight for him to be acquainted even with the main lines of the evidence.

We can prove that the latter, more charitable, explanation is the true one. That the cave drawings were religious in character everybody now knows—except, apparently, Mr. Wells—from two discovered characters. _First_, a large proportion of them are in the very depths and recesses of dark passages—sometimes deliberately obstructed—where they could have had no utilitarian or merely artistic object. But apart from this we have, _secondly_, the famous Phallic Dance, at Cogul, which is conclusively ritual, in garment and circle and all else.

I have a further right to conclude that Mr. Wells was simply ignorant of the evidence, and not merely shirking it, from his confused writing upon details not religious. Upon page 55 he writes, concerning the palæolithic men of the cave drawings, this sentence, “_It is doubtful if they knew of the bow._”

When I first read that sentence, I was so staggered I could hardly believe that I had read it right.

I have already confessed to a native inaccuracy in detail. I often have to read a thing several times to be certain I have not missed anything. I often skip a modifying phrase or word. I went carefully over several pages to make certain that I had not overlooked any qualifying term. But no. There was the thing in black and white.

It was the more extraordinary because here before me, in Mr. Wells’s own book, were reproductions of these cave paintings with the bow and arrow appearing all over them!

We have the clear statement that later palæolithic men—who knew not the bow nor domestic animals nor tillage—were succeeded by another culture which knew all these things, and that can only mean the neolithic culture. Yet, _after_ saying this, Mr. Wells remembers, or is told, that, after all there were palæolithic men who used the bow and made pictures of it. So he devotes a section to them, contradicting what he has just said. It is as though a man wishing to deny the Red Indians were to say “They did not know the horse, but were succeeded by a new culture of white men who did.” But having said that (and allowed his publisher to illustrate the remark with a picture of a Red Indian on horseback!) were to add a supplementary chapter saying, “By the way, before they disappeared they did get the horse.”

Mr. Wells would not have written thus if he had not been driven by the necessity of denying facts which did not fit in with his theology.

What is the point of saying that the cave painters, who made their drawings so often under conditions obviously religious, and who painted an unmistakable religious ceremonial dance, had “as yet no religion”? What is the motive producing so absurd a saying as that later palæolithic men did not know the bow and arrow which they painted so clearly, and then, as an afterthought, bringing in palæolithic men who _did_ know the bow and arrow? What is the driving force which makes a man write—in the teeth of the evidence—that this art arose very gradually from rude beginnings and progressed—instead of declining (as, in fact, it did)?

What is the point of saying that Neanderthal man may have spoken (_may_ have spoken! A man who made instruments, lit fires and buried his dead!)? Or why add that he had “nothing we should call language”? (On which point neither Mr. Wells nor any other man has the least information and which on the face of it is wildly improbable.)

The answer is that you have to imagine facts without evidence, you have also to distort facts, you have also to suppress them if you are to present to your readers a childishly simple scheme of regular and, above all, slow “progress.”

You must make Early Man last as long as possible and be as base as possible. If the facts will not fit in with that very slow process of development, which was felt (stupidly enough!) to make a Creator less necessary, so much the worse for the facts. Such very slow advance, unconscious, of imperceptible degrees—mechanical—such prolonged bestiality in true man, was dogma with all cultured people thirty or forty years ago. It is still dogma with Mr. Wells. Being dogma, and dogma divorced from reason, the facts must give way to it.

Or turn to the origins of Sacrifice. We come at the outset on the very true remark that the killing of a man is a very violent and striking act. But immediately after we find the quite false remark that such ritual murder would be “naturally” associated with any propitiatory offer. Mr. Wells at once proceeds to postulate this horrible perversion as a universal human action and a precursor of all religion. He has no basis for that at all. It is made up, not indeed by him, but by the older men whom he copies—the writers who were authorities half a lifetime ago, notably Frazer.

There is plenty of evidence to show that men have put their fellow-beings to death here and there, and have done so in _all_ states of culture and for all manner of widely differing reasons—ritual, vindictive, military, magical, judicial. But there is not a scrap of evidence to show that such murder was original to religion, and most certainly it was not universal. The attempt to prove it universal has not only failed, but ought never to have been made: for it is nonsense.

Frazer, in _The Golden Bough_, gathered all the evidence he could—most of it negligible, some of it doubtful, a little of it firm and good—upon human sacrifice as connected with harvest. All he could show was that some few sets of men have here and there, in places unconnected and wide apart in time, killed men in a ritual fashion from a superstition that such ritual murder would procure them a good harvest. There is no sort of proof that it was a general human custom; and what is worse, there is no distinction in Frazer between certain evidence, uncertain and worthless.

I should have thought that by this time educated opinion was alive to that criticism: it is many years since Andrew Lang died; and Andrew Lang (in this country—it had little acceptance abroad) blew the theory sky-high—I mean the theory that human sacrifice was an original universal accompaniment of the sowing or the harvest.

Human sacrifice being a violent because a horrible thing, has occasionally accompanied the desire for victory in war. It has accompanied mourning for the great. It has been the product of terror under defeat or pestilence. It has appeared in all sorts of forms, connected with pretty well any violent emotion of desire or dread. It has been particularly noticeable in very high civilizations; Carthage had it at the very height of her luxury and greatness. Mexico had it—most highly developed just when Mexico was, apparently, at the highest point of her material civilization. Some savages have had it also. You get it in the Moabite Stone; you get echoes of it in the Jewish folk-lore of the Old Testament. You get it in a totally different form among the Gauls, where it is commonly an act of vengeance on criminals and prisoners, and in no way an act of magic. You also get an abhorrence of it among societies which have not fallen to the degradation of practising it; and these societies (by the way) usually prove the masters and the betters of those who practise it. But of human sacrifice as an original and universal habit, there is not a sign. To believe _that_ you have to swallow whole the fourfold trick of Frazer’s _Golden Bough_, which is:

(1) To gather all scraps of evidence indifferently, including a mass of vague hearsay and stuff at third hand, and vague analogies, and any custom, game, lark, or legend, however remote from killing, which can be guessed to be—or asserted to be—a memory of that perversion. (2) To leave out all counter evidence. (3) To put the thing cumulatively and (4) Then to present it as proved.

In such fashion any theory, however wild, could be demonstrated to satisfaction. Mr. Chesterton has wittily shown how it can be used to prove that History (what with Calvus, Socrates, Cæsar, tonsured Priests, and Calvin) is dominated by bald heads.

Such is Frazer’s “proof” of universal original ritual human sacrifice.

Yet upon the assumption that this horror was universal and original, all Mr. Wells’s argument in this department is based; including what is not argument at all, but mere fiction, his elaborate and purely imaginary description of human sacrifice at Stonehenge.

Oh! That Human Sacrifice at Stonehenge! How well we know it! In how many cheap magazines, in how many journalistic allusions! With such a lineage it could hardly fail to turn up in such a best-seller as this _Outline of History_.

In point of fact we have no knowledge whatever of the use of Stonehenge or its purpose, and not a scintilla of evidence on its being used for human sacrifice. But the cinema public will have it so.

Historically the whole talk of human sacrifice as original to religion is quite worthless. There is no general evidence of the thing in the remains of prehistoric civilization; no picture, no sculpture, no language test. We may safely prophesy that if this nameless perversion reappears among men—as it well may—it will reappear not in their simplest societies, but rather in their most refined.

The bulwark against all such things—and such murder is but one out of myriads of possible monstrosities—is that general tradition of our morals and culture which depends upon the Catholic Church. Men do not grow out of their evils: they return to them, lacking a Divine guide.

When, therefore, I lay down Mr. Wells’s book (not without relief) and find my eyes following the phrase upon page 72, “it _must_ be clear from what has gone before that primitive man could have had no idea of God or of religion,” I leave that comic phrase “it must be clear” to the judgment of the reader.

There never was any writer _less_ clear in his ideas than the author of this work when he deals with Early Man: and as to the few real facts and his conclusions from them, they dance such a saraband that you never know where you are, nor which is first or last, nor which is top and which is tail.

First religion arises in some beast living before man who gets a “complex” of terror from his horrible old father; then it is neolithic man who gets it—after an immense interval with no religion at all. On one page a thing is possible; two pages later probable; four pages on it is certain. A man having put forward a theory in 1893, it is still gospel in 1926, though exploded in 1895. A feathered chieftain waving bows and arrows at you is ignorant of the bow, and the poor devils of deer with arrows stuck into them everywhere are told that their hunters knew nothing of arrows.

It is on science of this kind, instruction of that calibre, and culture of such a tone, that we are asked to abandon the Faith, which made, and on whose retention depends, the civilization of our race.