themselves to an issue that rose far above all personal considerations, involving as it did the welfare of Italy and of Christendom. Perhaps they muttered in their timidity, "Truth belongs to God; he has it in his keeping." Verily he will not suffer the truth to perish; but woe betide the cravens who come not up to the help of the Lord! It was quite true that Urban VIII and the Holy Office could not stop the rotation of the earth, but they could and did stop the progress of Italian science. Even Viviani and Torricelli abandoned the regions that their master had explored to his undoing. It is quite true that the stars in their courses fought against this unreason; and in due time the Herschels followed in their train. But, in spite of the stars, malignants like Caccini and obscurantists like Inchofer made of Italy an intellectual desert and called it peace; and the depths of degradation to which Italian preaching sank can be measured by reading Father Orchi's sermons, that delighted vast crowds in the cathedral of Milan; as pitiful drivel as ever tickled itching ears.

That an infirm old man, after months of physical suffering and moral torture, could be goaded to perjury by one called the Vicar of God is terrible enough; yet it is a small thing compared with what these persecutors of Galileo and of Port-Royal hoped to do in Catholic Europe. And it was no fault of the Calvinists of Holland, the Puritans of Massachusetts, the Episcopalians of Great Britain, the Lutherans of Norway, that like conditions were not imposed upon the thought of the Protestant world. We have indeed been saved, but so as by fire. The rack and the fagot are gone. The instruments of torture peculiar to our age are mild compared with the stake and the scaffold, the prison and the exile, that threatened the pioneers of intellectual discovery. At the worst the afflictions of the modern thinker are light compared with theirs misrepresentation and calumny, brutal attacks from the ignorant and the unscrupulous, the distrust of the timid and the hatred of vested interests, the loss of friends, or of position or of opportunity, thwarted plans and wasted strength. The modern thinker need not resist unto blood and it ill becomes him to pose as a martyr. The chief sufferer from enforced silence is the community that permits it to be needlessly imposed. For a moral

atmosphere deprived of the love of the truth becomes corrupt and deadly. More important than any particular truth is the love of truth and the hatred of falsehood. Recent revelations indicate with distressing clearness that the air of America is poisoned with an idolatrous belief in the power of deception. Yet God's hatred for untruth is writ large in the Scriptures and in the annals of mankind. "Because they received not the love of the truth which might have saved them" wrote Paul, in words that stab like lightning, "therefore God sendeth them the working of delusion which is to believe a lie and be damned." Such is the penalty that has befallen the church whenever it has imposed a needless silence. It befell the Church of Rome when it tried to silence Luther; it befell the same church again when it goaded Galileo to perjury and Port-Royal to destruction. It befell the Church of England when it drove the non-conformists to prison, to poverty and to exile. There is a silence that is golden. It is the silence described by Pasteur in words of thrilling powerthe silence "of the investigator who believes that he has discovered a scientific truth, yet imposes silence on himself, sometimes for years, striving to destroy those very conclusions and never proclaiming his discovery until every adverse hypothesis has been exhausted." This is the golden seal upon lips that love the truth. There is, though, another kind of silence, shameful and destructive of all real knowledge, and this was the kind of silence imposed upon the investigators of Catholic Christendom by Urban and the Holy Office. They enlarged the Articles of Faith so as to make inquiry impossible and the search for truth a crime within their jurisdiction. In their purblind arrogance they were trying to obliterate the laws of God. His fixa quiescit wrote the fawning Jesuit to the haughty pontiff. The earth stood not still; neither did he that sitteth in the heavens laugh. For although the Lord had them in derision, his grief and his anger were greater than his mirth. The Bride of Christ was being dishonored in the house of her pretended guardians.

Charles J. Littl

ART. III. PRIMITIVE RELIGION AND THE PSYCHIC NATURE

PRIMITIVE man determined primitive religion. What he was by nature regulated what he was in belief and deed. A fundamental problem it is, therefore, to discover what kind of a being this new-born creature was, standing awestruck in the presence of the sublime world in which he was the masterpiece. Not much do we know about him historically, but present-day psychology and anthropology permit us to make some very definite claims concerning his nature. The new branches of learning have conclusively demonstrated that in no sense can the modern savage, with his bestiality and absence of moral insight, be taken as representative of God's earliest members of the human family. Since the days of John Stuart Mill the wisest thinkers have held that the savage of to-day is a degenerate, the lamentable resultant of gross and long-continued errors in belief and conduct. Little light can he throw, therefore, upon the problem of the origin of the religious life. Much more sane is the tendency toward the study of the soullife of the child as representative of all mankind. Runze is an ardent advocate of this method when he states, "The analysis of the child's soul-life furnishes the clearest insight into the origin of religion." Nor has a certain brand of science failed to contribute an answer. Dominated largely by the conception of man as the product of an evolutionary process, it has tended to crowd him as near as possible on to the plane of the animal, and to place the smallest valuation upon his intellectual and spiritual capacities. The exigencies of the theory demand that "only by chance does man happen to stand at the summit of the hierarchies of plant and animal," and that between primitive man and the brute creation there is but an insignificant difference, inasmuch as all of his impulses and conceptions and psychic manifestations are but slightly modified copies of what is found in animals. Religion, then, is degraded, and is traced to mean origins. Empedocles declared it to be a "mental malady," Fuerbash characterized it as "the most

pernicious disease of mankind," and others attempt to account for it as the outcome of ignorance and fear. Darwin, for example, sees a religious element in the action of his dog when the creature howls with fear before a curtain swayed by the wind, as vaguely suggesting to it an unknown and terrible power.

Diametrically opposed to these mistaken naturalistic theories is the view that has been in large measure the traditional tenet of theology. This conceives of man as characterized in the beginning by a unique perfection, possessing high intellectual and spiritual endowments, as fully developed in high psychic faculties as to be reckoned a true Aristotle, with a marvelous grasp of mental problems, with an unimpeachable moral nature, and living in communion with the Infinite by immediate knowledge. This theory has the immense advantage of grounding religion in man's nature, and of making his spiritual manifestations not fortuitous and superficial, but normal and primary and fundamental. Lubbock and Tyler, who lent all of their learning to the support of the belief that religion was not an essential part of human nature, have been proven guilty of misinterpretation of their ethnological data, and have been superseded by such scholars as Oustrefages, who states, "Nowhere do we find even a division of the human race, however unimportant, professing atheism. Everywhere and always man has a religion." Its very universality, therefore, argues against any superficial, sceptical, and sensationalistic theory as to its origin, and compels us to seek for its fundamentals in human nature itself. As Kellogg says, "Religion exists because man is what he is." But even after we have reached this conclusion much sifting is necessary before we can get at the truth as to how religion is related to man's nature. Plato and Cicero held to the theory of "innate ideas" as giving the explanation for religion, and in later philosophy Descartes, Locke, and almost all of the deists of England and France, held that man was born with a knowledge of God and that all spiritual conceptions were as native to him as is sight or hearing. The theory aims at making religion simple, but, if it is true, there ought surely to be a more noticeable agreement be tween religious phenomena and conception among various peoples.

But even the fundamental contention of "innate ideas" has been discredited since the days of Hume and Kant. All that the mind possesses is, as Rumze says, "Capabilities and tendencies which gradually unfold themselves." Closely allied to this impossible theory is that of "Intuitionalism," which claims, as Caldecat shows, that "the divine world was known by immediate perception, like the external world, or else by self-evident perception, like the mathematical axioms." But this view, despite its popularity with some theologians, has generally been questioned because of its many implied contradictions, and particularly because it separates religion too largely from the recognized faculties of the human nature. Not less objectionable is that theory which argues for some "special faculty of the soul" to recognize God. It begs the question and is meaningless. As Bowne declares, "Nothing is explained by reference to a faculty, since the faculty is only an abstraction from the facts." Decidedly the most popular conception in regard to the origin of religion is that of a supernatural revelation by means of which man is put immediately into knowledge of God and communion with the spiritual world." "Just as the dog knows his master in man, just so does man have by revelation this knowledge that makes him conscious of God." And to this view Jewish, Mohammedan, and Christian systems of theology have persistently held; assuming, as Jastrow states, "Divine revelation as a necessary factor in the use of religion." True religion, then, is in one sense or another the result of God's revelation; and some would declare, with Justin Martyr, that all false religions are the revelation of demons. The great Gladstone maintained that all of man's knowledge of God was given by direct revelation, and that religion, as given in the beginning, contained six fundamental doctrines, such as the unity of God, a divine Trinity, and the connection of the Redeemer with humanity by his miraculous birth. But, however strongly anyone may hold to the general theory of a primitive revelation, certain it is that this particular view must be summarily dismissed. Shelling's subtle protest strikes deep when he says that this conception of a primitive Revelation does violence to the dignity of man, making him natively