CHAPTER II.

SPECIAL TYPES.

LAW OF DEVELOPMENT.

§ 1. Every Religion has its own Special Type. Two false Theories. § 2. Race and Nationality. § 3. Increased knowledge of Ethnic Religions during the last Century. § 4. Unity and Persistence of Type in Each Religion. § 5. The Typical ideas of Brahmanism, Buddhism, the Zend-Avesta, and the Religion of Egypt. § 6. Corruptions and Degradations of each Religion foreign to its original Type. § 7. Affirmations true; Negations false. § 8. Simplistic Systems are Short-Lived. Coördinated antagonisms necessary for continued Development.

§ 1. Each Religion has its own Special Type. Two false

Theories.

THE subject of this chapter will be the special character, or type of each religion; that which distinguishes it from every other, and enables it to do a special work, different from every other; that which constitutes its power and its weakness, makes it acceptable to some and distasteful to others, develops a polar force which attracts or repels; its one special note which allots it a place in the great harmony of the coming universal religion of mankind.

I wish to show that each religion has this type of its own, to which it adheres as long as it lives and acts effectually, and also how we determine what this type is.

Each religion has a type of its own, to which it adheres during its whole growth and development.

Two views are opposed to this: (1.) The old Christian theological division, which put in one category all gentile or ethnic religions, calling them pagan, heathen, idolatries, superstitions. Because of this view no attempt was made to discover the character of each, as they were accounted equally false and worthy only of contempt. They were regarded, not as natural growths of the religious nature, but as monstrous deformities, proceeding from sin, and containing only error. (2.) In the reaction from this extreme some minds have gone to the opposite extreme. The reaction from the view which made all systems of faith outside of Christendom equally false, has produced the doctrine that they are all equally true. Similarities and resemblances have been found, and diversities ignored. The ethnic scriptures have been searched for parallels; these have been put side by side, and the conclusion has been easily drawn that all these faiths are essentially one, possibly some a little better than others, but all teaching the same essential truths concerning God and nature, man

and morality, sin and pardon, immortality and retribution.

A scientific study of the faiths of the world will show both these two theories to be false. It will show that the same law applies to religions which is found to prevail in the other departments of nature; that the law of development is from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous; from chaos to cosmos; from monotony to variety; and that the great order and harmony of the universe results always from the concord of these varieties in mutual adaptation and coöperation. It would be a very poor concert in which there were fifty instruments all striking the same note and playing the same part. The harmony of the universe, like that of a chorus or a symphony, consists in the consenting varieties which accord in one divine union of agreeing though different parts.

That this is so can be only proved by extensive study, by collecting and comparing facts, and making the induction when all these facts have been ascertained.

The law of man's progress, in all the departments of human activity, has been from monotony to diversity, and by combined diversities to final coöperation and unión. (1.) Monotony; (2.) Diversity; (3.) Harmony, - these are the three steps of human progress, in the development of races, nations, industries, literature, science, art, mental and moral character.

§ 2. Race and Nationality.

Some philosophical historians, like Buckle, have ignored wholly the fact and influence of race, and attributed all the varieties of mankind to the influence of climate, soil, and external conditions. Others, like Knox, have said that "race is everything." The two views must be combined. The power of climatic conditions is no doubt great; but many facts show that it never succeeds in breaking down the original type of a human family. The Jews, Arabs, Teutons, Kelts, Negroes, Mongols, preserve the same characters for thousands of years, under wholly different external circumstances. This shows that there was an unexplained divergent tendency implanted in man, which caused manhood to branch into races just as the tree branches into limbs, and then subdivides again into other smaller limbs. History shows us the original Aryan race in Central Asia, differentiating itself, according to this law, into seven great branches, which have continued to this day, viz. the Hindu, Persian, Latin, Greek, Keltic, Teutonic, and Slavonic varieties. Another, the Turanian, has divided itself into the Mongols, Tartars, Turks, Magyars. Another, the Semitic, has branched into the Assyrian, Babylonian, Phoenician, Jewish, Carthaginian, and Arab tribes. All this has been proved by linguistic affinities.

But the law of differentiation does not exhaust itself in the lower ethnological divisions. It works on into the production of nationalities. The growth of national character is something which belongs even to modern history. We may be said to have seen this differentiation going on under our own eyes. We can observe in modern history the development of such distinct human types as the Italian, Spaniard, Frenchman, Englishman. A mixture of races, under new conditions, results in a new, distinct style of character-different from either—as when oxygen and hydrogen unite and produce water. The Englishman and Frenchman have characters of their own, and by some process of assimilation each citizen takes on more or less of his persistent national type. Here, in America, we see an American type gradually taking form, which, a hundred years hence, will have become another distinct and self-maintaining national type of character.

And so, too, within any race or nation, every new access of inward life shows itself in a new opening out of divergent forms of mental activity. So it was in Greece, when the wonderful Hellenic life-impulse suddenly developed such original forms of art and literature. Greek architecture, with its different orders, arrived. Greek statuary came, and rose to a sudden perfection. Plato and Aristotle developed systems of philosophy which have