📘 Jevons, An Introduction to the Study of Comparative Religion (assigned excerpts)

1. Buddhism, Self-Sacrifice, and the Hope of Eternal Life

F. B. Jevons, An Introduction to the Study of Comparative Religion (1908), chapter 2, “Immortality”. Assigned excerpt. The interpretations are the author’s.

Where then lies the strength of Buddhism, if as a logical structure it is rent from top to bottom by glaring inconsistency? It lies in its appeal to the spirit of self-sacrifice. What it denounces, from beginning to end, is the will to live. The reason why it denounces the will to live is that that will manifests itself exclusively in the desires of the individual; and it is to the desires of man that all the misery in the world are directly due. Destroy those desires by annihilating the will to live—and in no other way can they be destroyed—and the misery of the world will cease. The only termination to the misery of the world which Buddhism can imagine is the voluntary cessation of life which will ultimately ensue on the cessation of the will to live. And the means by which that is to be brought about is the uprooting and destruction of the self-regarding desires by means of the higher morality of self-sacrifice. What the Buddhist overlooks is that the uprooting and destruction of the self-regarding desires results, not in the annihilation, but in the purification and enhanced vitality, of the self that uproots them. The outcome of the unselfish and self-sacrificing life is not the destruction of individuality, but its highest realisation. Now, it is only in society and by living for others that this unselfishness and self-sacrifice can be carried out; man can only exist and unselfishness can only operate in society, and society means the communion of man with his fellows. It is true that only in society can selfishness exist; but it is recognized from the beginning as that which is destructive of society, and it is therefore condemned alike by the morality and the religion of the society. The communion of man with his fellows and his God is hindered, impeded, and blocked wholly and solely by his self-regarding desires; it is furthered and realised solely by his unselfish desires. But his unselfish desires involve and imply his existence—I was going to say, just as much, I mean—far more than his selfish desires, for they imply, and are only possible on, the assumption of the existence of his fellow-man, and of his communion with him. Nay! more, by the testimony of Buddhism itself as well as of the religious experience of mankind at large, the unselfish desires, the spirit of self-sacrifice, require both for their logical and their emotional justification, still more for their practical operation, the faith that by means of them the will of God is carried out, and that in them man shows likest God. It is in them and by them that the communion of man with his fellow-man and with his God is realised. It is the faith that such communion, though it may be interrupted, can never be entirely broken which manifests itself in the belief in immortality. That belief may take shape in the idea that the souls of the departed revisit this earth temporarily in ghostly form, or more permanently as reincarnated in the new-born members of the tribe; it may body forth another world of bliss or woe, and if it is to subserve the purposes of morality, it must so do; nay! more, if it is to subserve the purposes of morality, it is into the presence of the Lord that the soul must go. But in any and whatever shape the belief takes, the soul is conceived or implied to be in communion with other spirits. There is no other way in which it is possible to conceive the existence of a soul; just as any particle of matter, to be comprehended in its full reality, implies not only every other particle of matter but the universe which comprehends them, so the existence of any spirit logically implies not only the existence of every other but also of Him without whom no one of them could be. It is in this belief in the communion of spirits wherever he may find it—and where will he not?—that the missionary may obtain a leverage for his work. It is a sure basis for his operations because the desire for communion is universal; and Christianity alone, of the religions of the world, teaches that self-sacrifice is the way to life eternal.

2. The Missionary and the Decline of Magic

F. B. Jevons, An Introduction to the Study of Comparative Religion (1908), chapter 3, “Magic”. Assigned excerpt. The interpretations are the author’s.

A few words are necessary as to the decline of the belief. The first is that the belief is rotten before it is ripe. Those applications of the principle that like produces like which are magical are generally precisely those which are false. The fact that they are false has not prevented them from surviving in countless numbers to the present day. But some suspicion of their falsity in some cases does arise; and the person who has the most frequent opportunities of discovering their falsity, the person on whose notice the discovery of their falsity is thrust most pointedly, is the person who deals habitually and professionally in magic. Hence, though it is his profession to work wonders, he takes care as far as may be not to attempt impossibilities. Thus Dr. Haddon (l.c., p. 62) found that the men of Murray Island, Torres Straits, who made a “big wind” by magic, only made it in the season of the southeast trade wind. “On my asking,” he says, “whether the ceremony was done in the north monsoon, my informant said emphatically, ‘Can’t do it in northwest.’ That is, the charm is performed only at that season of the year when the required result is possible—indeed when it is of normal occurrence. In this, as in other cases, I found that the impossible was never attempted. A rain charm would not be made when there was no expectation of rain coming, or a southeast wind be raised during the wrong season.” The instance thus given to us by Dr. Haddon shows how the belief in magic begins to give way before the scientific observation of fact. The collapse of magic becomes complete when every one sees that the southeast trade wind blows at its appointed time, whether the magic rites are performed or not. In fine, what kills magic regarded as a means for producing effects is the discovery that it is superfluous, when for instance the desired wind or rain is coming, and futile when it is not. And whereas morality and religion only condemn the end aimed at by magic, and only condemn it when it is anti-social, science slowly shows that magic as a means to any end is superfluous and silly.

Science, however, shows this but slowly; and if we wish to understand how it is that the belief in the magician’s power has survived for thousands of years down to the present moment amongst numerous peoples, we must remember that his equipment and apparatus are not limited to purely nonsensical notions. On the contrary, in his stock of knowledge, carefully handed down, are many truths and facts not generally known; and they are the most efficacious articles of his stock in trade. Dr. Frazer may not go farther than his argument requires, but he certainly goes farther than the facts will support him, when he says (l.c., p. 83) “for it must always be remembered that every single profession and claim put forward by the magician as such is false; not one of them can be maintained without deception, conscious or unconscious.”

If now, in conclusion, we look once more at the subject of magic and look at it from the practical point of view of the missionary, we shall see that there are several conclusions which may be of use to him. In the first place, his attitude to magic will be hostile, and in his hostility to it he will find the best starting-point for his campaign against it to be in the fact that everywhere magic is felt, to a greater or less extent, to be anti-social, and is condemned both by the moral sentiments and the religious feeling of the community. It is felt to be essentially wicked; and in warring against it the missionary will be championing the cause of those who know it to be wrong but who simply dare not defy it. The fact that defiance is not ventured on is essential to the continuance of the tyranny; and what is necessary, if it is to be defied, is an actual concrete example of the fact that when defied it is futile.

Next, where magic is practised for social purposes, where it mimics science or religion and survives in virtue of its power of “protective colouring,” it is in fact superfluous and silly; and where the natives themselves are beginning to recognise that the magic which is supposed, for instance, to raise the southeast trade wind won’t act at the wrong season, it should not be difficult to get them to see that it is unnecessary at the right season. The natural process which tends thus to get rid of magic may be accelerated by the sensible missionary; and some knowledge of science will be found in this, as in other matters, an indispensable part of his training.

Finally, the missionary may rest assured in the conviction that his flank will not be turned by the science of religion. The idea that religion was preceded by and evolved out of magic may have been entertained by some students of the science of religion in the past, and may not yet have been thrown off by all. But it holds no place now in the science of religion. To derive either science or religion from the magic which exists only by mimicking one or the other is just as absurd as to imagine that the insect which imitates the colour of the leaf whereon it lives precedes and creates the tree which is to support it.

3. The Missionary and the Prayers of Other Peoples

F. B. Jevons, An Introduction to the Study of Comparative Religion (1908), chapter 5, “Prayer”. Assigned excerpt. The interpretations are the author’s.

The physician, if he is to do his work, must know both a healthy and a diseased body, or organ, when he sees it. He must know the difference between the two and the symptoms both of health and disease. Otherwise he is in danger of trying to cure an organ which is healthy already—in which case his remedies will simply aggravate the disease. That is obviously true of the physician who seeks to heal the body, and it is equally, if not so obviously, true of the physician who seeks to minister to a mind, or a soul, diseased. Now, the missionary will find that the heathen, to whom he is to minister, have the habit of prayer; and the question arises, What is to be his attitude towards it? He cannot take up the position that prayer is in itself a habit to be condemned; he is not there to eradicate the habit, or to uproot the tendency. Neither is he there to create the habit; it already exists, and the wise missionary will acknowledge its existence with thankfulness. His business is not to teach his flock to pray, but how to pray, that is to say, for what and to whom. But even if he thus wisely recognises that prayer is a habit not to be created, but to be trained by him, it is still possible for him to assume rashly that it is simply impossible for a heathen ever to pray for anything that is right, and therefore, that it is a missionary’s duty first to insist that everything for which a savage or barbarian prays must be condemned as essentially irreligious and wicked. In that case, what will such a missionary, if sent to the Khonds of Orissa, say, when he finds them praying thus: “We are ignorant of what it is good to ask for. You know what is good for us. Give it to us!”? Can he possibly say to his flock, “All your prayers, all the things that you pray for now, are wicked; and your only hope of salvation lies in ceasing to pray for them”? If not, then he must recognise the fact that it is possible for the heathen to pray, and to pray for some things that it is right to pray for. And he must not only recognise the fact, but he must utilise it. Nay! more, he must not only recognise the fact if it chances to force itself upon him, he must go out of his way with the deliberate purpose of finding out what things are prayed for. He will then find himself in more intimate contact with the soul of the man than he can ever attain to in any other way; and he may then find that there are other things for which petitions are put up which could not be prayed for save by a man who had a defective or erroneous conception of Him who alone can answer prayer.

But it is a blundering, unbusinesslike way of managing things if the missionary has to go out to his work unprepared in this essential matter, and has to find out these things for himself—and perhaps not find them out at all. The applied science of religion should equip him in this respect; it should be able to take the facts and truths established by the science of religion and apply them to the purposes of the missionary. But it is a striking example of the youth and immaturity of the science of religion that no attempt has yet been made by it to collect the facts, much less to coördinate and state them scientifically. If a thing is clear, when we come to think of it, in the history of religion, it is that the gods are there to be prayed to: man worships them because it is on their knees that all things lie. It is from them that man hopes all things; it is in prayer that man expresses his hopes and desires. It is from his prayers that we should be able to find out what the gods really are to whom man prays. What is said about them in mythology—or even in theology—is the product of reflection, and is in many cases demonstrably different from what is given in consciousness at the moment when man is striving after communion with the Highest. Yet it is from mythology, or from the still more reflective and deliberative expression of ritual, of rites and ceremonies, that the science of religion has sought to infer the nature of the gods man worships. The whole apparatus of religion, rites and ceremonies, sacrifice and altars, nature-worship and polytheism, has been investigated; the one thing overlooked has been the one thing for the sake of which all the others exist, the prayer in which man’s soul rises, or seeks to rise, to God.

4. Does Morality Stand Without Religion?

F. B. Jevons, An Introduction to the Study of Comparative Religion (1908), chapter 7, “Morality”. Assigned excerpt. The interpretations are the author’s.

But though society for many long centuries continues to punish rebellion against God, still in the long run it ceases, or tends to cease, doing so. Its reason for so ceasing is interpreted differently by different schools of thought. On the one hand, it is said in derision, let the gods punish offences against the gods—the implication being that there are no such offences to punish, because there is no god. On the other hand, it is said, “I will repay, saith the Lord”—the implication being that man may not assume to be the minister of divine vengeance. If, then, we bear in mind that the fact may be interpreted in either of these different ways, we shall not fall into the fallacy of imagining that the mere existence of the fact suffices to prove either interpretation to be true. Yet this fallacy plays its part in lending fictitious support to the doctrine that morality is in no wise dependent upon religion. The offences now punished by law, it is argued, are no longer punished as offences against religion, but solely as offences against the good of the community. To this argument the reply is that men believe the good of the community to be the will of God, and do not believe murder, theft, adultery, etc., to be merely offences against man’s laws. Overlooking this fact, which is fatal to the doctrine that morality is in no wise dependent on religion, the argument we are discussing proceeds to maintain that the basis for the enforcement of morality by the law is recognised by every one who knows anything of the philosophy of law to be what is good for the community and its members: fraud and violence are punished as such, and not because they are offences against this or that religion. The fact that the law no longer punishes them as offences against God suffices to show that it is only as offences against humanity that there is any sense, or ever was any sense, in punishing them. Religion may have reënforced morality very usefully at one time, by making out that moral misdeeds were offences against God, but such arguments are not now required. The good and the well-being of humanity is in itself sufficient argument. Humanitarianism is taking the place of religion, and by so doing is demonstrating that morality is, as it always has been, independent of religion; and that in truth religion has built upon it, not it upon religion. As Höffding puts it (p. 328): “Religious faith ... assumes an independent human ethic developed historically under the practical influence of the ethical feeling of man.” That is to say, morality is in Höffding’s view independent of religion, and prior to religion, both as a matter of logic and of history. As a matter of history—of the history of religion—this seems to me, for the reasons already given, to be contrary to the facts as they are known. The real reason for maintaining that morality is and must be—and must have been—independent of religion, seems to me to be a philosophical reason. I may give it in Höffding’s own words: “What other aims and qualities,” he asks (p. 324), “could man attribute to his gods or conceive as divine, but those which he has learnt from his own experience to recognise as the highest?” The answer expected to the question plainly is not merely that it is from experience that man learns, but that man has no experience of God from which he could learn. The answer given by Mr. Hobhouse, in the concluding words of his Morals in Evolution is that “the collective wisdom” of man “is all that we directly know of the Divine.” Here, too, no direct access to God is allowed to be possible to man. It is from his experience of other men—perhaps even of himself and his own doings—that man learns all he knows of God: but he has himself no experience of God. Obviously, then, from this humanitarian point of view, what a man goes through in his religious moments is not experience, and we are mistaken if we imagine that it was experience; it is only a misinterpretation of experience. It is on the supposition that we are mistaken, on the assumption that we make a misinterpretation, that the argument is built to prove that morality is and must be independent of religion. Argument to show, or proof to demonstrate, that we had not the experience, or, that we mistook something else for it, is, of course, not forthcoming. But if we hold fast to our conviction, we are told that we are fleeing “to the bosom of faith.” Until some better argument is produced, we may be well content not merely to flee but to rest there.

5. The Finality of Christianity

F. B. Jevons, An Introduction to the Study of Comparative Religion (1908), chapter 8, “Christianity”. Assigned excerpt. The interpretations are the author’s.

If we look with the eye of the missionary over the globe, everywhere we see arrested development, imperfect communion with God. It may be that in such cases of imperfect communion there is an unconscious or hardly conscious recognition that the form of religion there and then prevalent does not suffice to afford the communion desired. Or, worse still, and much more general, there is the belief that such communion as does exist is all that can exist—that advance and improvement are impossible. From this state it has been the work of the religious spirit to wake us, to reveal to us God’s will, to make us understand that it is within us, and that it may, if we will, work within us. It is as such a revelation of the will of God and the love of God, and as the manifestation of the personality of God, that our Lord appeared on earth.

That appearance as a historic fact must take its place in the order of historic events, and must stand in relation to what preceded and to what followed and is yet to follow. In relation to what preceded, Christianity claims “to be the fulfilment of all that is true in previous religion” (Illingworth, Personality: Human and Divine, p. 75). The making of that claim assumes that there was some truth in previous religion, that so far as previous forms were religious, they were true—a fact that must constantly be borne in mind by the missionary. The truth and the good inherent in all forms of religion is that, in all, man seeks after God. The finality of Christianity lies in the fact that it reveals the God for whom man seeks. What was true in other religions was the belief in the possibility of communion with God, and the belief that only as a member of a society could the individual man attain to that communion. What is offered by Christianity is a means of grace whereby that communion may be attained and a society in which the individual may attain it. Christianity offers a means whereby the end aimed at by all religions may be realised. Its finality, therefore, does not consist in its chronological relation to other religions. It is not final because, or in the sense that, it supervened in the order of time upon previous religions, or that it fulfilled only their truth. Other religions have, as a matter of chronology, followed it, and yet others may follow it hereafter. But their chronological order is irrelevant to the question: Which of them best realises the end at which religion, in all its forms, aims? And it is the answer to that question which must determine the finality of any form of religion. No one would consider the fact that Mahommedanism dates some centuries after Christ any proof of its superiority to Christianity. And the lapse of time, however much greater, would constitute no greater proof.

That different forms of religion do realise the end of religion in different degrees is a point on which there is general agreement. Monotheism is pronounced higher than polytheism, ethical religions higher than non-ethical. What differentiates Christianity from other ethical religions and from other forms of monotheism, is that in them religion appears as ancillary to morality, and imposes penalties and rewards with a view to enforce or encourage morality. In them, at their highest, the love of man is for his fellow-man, and usually for himself. Christianity alone makes love of God to be the true basis and the only end of society, both that whereby personality exists and the end in which it seeks its realisation. Therein the Christian theory of society differs from all others. Not merely does it hold that man cannot make himself better without making society better, that development of personality cannot be effected without a corresponding development of society. But it holds that such moral development and improvement of the individual and of society can find no rational basis and has no rational end, save in the love of God.