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$Title{History Of Religions
Preface}
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$Author{Foot Moore, George}
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$Subject{religions
history
religion
peoples
volume
chapters
civilisation
english
higher
india}
$Date{1913}
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Title:       History Of Religions
Book:        Introduction
Author:      Foot Moore, George
Date:        1913

Preface

     The plan of this work embraces only the religions of civilised peoples.
What are miscalled "primitive" religions are a subject for themselves,
demanding another method, and much too extensive to be incidentally despatched
in the prolegomena to a History of Religions.  Nor is an investigation of them
necessary to our purpose; the phenomena which occur in the higher religions as
survivals are just as intelligible in Babylonia or in Greece as in Africa or
Australia.

     The present volume comprises the religions of China, Japan, Egypt,
Babylonia and Assyria, India, Persia (Zoroastrianism), Greece, and Rome
(including the religions of the Empire).  A second volume will be devoted to
Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism - three religions so intimately
related in origin and history as to constitute a natural group.

     In the presentation of the several religions, the endeavour is made, as
far as the sources permit, to show their relation to race and physical
environment and to national life and civilisation, to trace their history, and
to discover the causes of progress and decline and the influences that have
affected them from without.  Prominence is given to religious conceptions, as
they are implicit in myth and ritual or are thought out by poets,
philosophers, and prophets; and particularly to the higher developments in
theology, ethics, and religious philosophy, especially where, as in India and
in Greece, these developments are of great intrinsic interest and of abiding
consequence.  In the case of the Greeks there is another reason for fuller
exposition: Christian, Jewish, and Moslem theology are so largely in debt to
Greek philosophy that these chapters lay the foundation for much of the second
volume.

     The limitations of space forbid the multiplication of illustrative
extracts and of citations from the sources or from modern writers, as well as
the discussion at length of controversial points.  The annotated bibliography
may be taken in partial compensation.  To facilitate comparison of
institutions, observances, and ideas in different religions, the index has
been prepared with especial reference to this use (see, e.g., such entries as
"Eschatology," "Ethics," "God," "Sacrifice," "Salvation").

     All the peoples with whom this volume deals emerge upon our knowledge in
a relatively advanced stage of development, when compared with ancient or
modern savages.  The days are past when the "Juventus Mundi" was pictured for
us from the pages of Homer, and the Hymns of the Rig-Veda were thought to lisp
the "parler enfantin" of religion. ^1 Most of the religions appear upon the
scene of history as national polytheisms, to a considerable degree moralised;
what went before that lies as completely beyond the horizon of history as the
beginnings of civilisation.  But they carry on many survivals of a prehistoric
stage of culture, embedded in the ritual and myth of public religions, or as
superstitions among the masses.  These features persist with the tenacity of
an organic inheritance; in times of demoralisation or decadence they revive
and prevail.  At bottom they are all alike, being in fact the one inextirpable
religion of the race, entailed by remote ancestors.  Such phenomena enable the
historian to prolong his vision beyond the confines of history: in these
survivals he recognises antecedents and divine origins.  Their inveteracy
explains, too, the inertia with which the progress of higher ideas has to
contend, the violence of reaction against reforms, the swiftness of decadence.
But only in so far are these elements the object of the historian's concern;
their origin and affinities belong to the anthropologist with the religions of
modern savages.

[Footnote 1: This characteristic phrase is Max Muller's.]

     Upon the higher plane of the natural polytheisms, also, there is much
that is common.  But on this level national individuality begins to count for
more in all spheres of culture, and in religion it becomes more distinct with
every step of progress.  In this respect there are wide differences among
religions of comparable advancement: some have developed independently,
according to their own genius, while others early came under the influence of
higher civilisations by which the native development was arrested or turned
into new channels.  Such fusion has occurred repeatedly - Rome and Japan at
once present themselves as instances.  In the Hellenistic and Roman world a
massive syncretism, favoured by political and social causes and cultivated by
pantheistic philosophies, is the signature of the age.

     In religions as in civilisations it is not the generic features but the
individual characteristics that give them their highest interest and, we may
say, value.  It has accordingly been the author's aim, without exaggeration,
to bring into relief the individuality of the several religions as it
expresses itself in their history.  In the religions of India and Persia, for
example, the background of common Indo-Iranian cult and myth is of great
moment to the student of Indo-Germanic origins; but in the historical
religions themselves the striking and instructive thing is the diametrically
opposite directions of the development, notwithstanding the close kinship of
the two peoples and their common inheritance.

     The student who attentively surveys the whole field can hardly fail to
discern a unity in the diversity, a general trend of evolution, which warrants
the more comprehensive conception of a history of religion.  Local and natural
religions fuse in national polytheisms; the progress of civilisation in
varying degrees moralises religion; mythology and nascent philosophy take up
the problem of cosmogony, and are led to unify the creative power or the first
principle; the demand for unity in the moral order of the world also tends
toward monotheism; vague notions of continuance after death give place to more
vivid imaginations; the lot of mortals appears more dismal in contrast to that
of the gods; the belief in divine retribution or in the inexorable consequence
of deeds is extended beyond this life; man struggles to escape his destiny,
and demands of religion that it shall show him the way and give him the
assurance of deliverance.  Thereupon a new kind of religion arises in which
men ask, not to be satisfied with the good things of this life, but to be
exalted above the limitations of humanity or to be saved from the consequences
of deeds, and, positively, to share the blessedness of the gods or to attain
to union with the godhead.  Salvation may be sought - to adopt the Indian
analysis - by the way of works, or of knowledge, or of faith; and the methods
vary accordingly.  Religions of this type address themselves to the
individual, and are therefore, logically, ways of salvation for all men,
without distinction of nation or race; they often form organised religious
communities and spread by missionary effort; the teachings of the founders are
collected in a canon of authoritative scriptures and systematised in a body of
doctrine, practical or philosophical.

     The great religions of this class have their beginnings in the centuries
from the eighth to the fifth before the Christian era.  This is the age of
Taoism in China; of the Upanishads, of Buddhism, and of the precursors of
Hinduism in India; of Zoroaster in Iran; of the Orphic-Pythagorean movement in
Greece; and of the Hebrew prophets.  The coincidence is more than curious; it
is an instance of that simultaneity in progress and decline, comparable to
geological epochs of upheaval and subsidence, of which the history of
civilisation has other striking examples - we think of the centuries about
3000 B. C. in Egypt, Babylonia and Elam, Crete, and China, the first maximum
in this strange and unexplained periodicity.  In like manner, whatever the
cause, the eighth to the fifth centuries B.C. witnessed a maximum in the tides
of religion.  The religions of civilised peoples in our own time are almost
all of this type - Buddhism and Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam -
though the actual religion of the peoples who profess these faiths contains
large survivals of earlier stages, down to the level before the dawn of
civilisation.

     The field of this volume is much too wide to be covered with first-hand
knowledge by any one scholar.  Most recent works of similar scope are
consequently the cooperative product of several authors, each of whom writes
on that part of the subject with which he is especially qualified to deal by
knowledge of the language, literature, and history of the people, and
sometimes by actual observation of their living religion. The advantages of
such a division of labour are too obvious to need a word. But it is difficult,
not to say impossible, in this way to secure unity either in method of
treatment or - what is more important - in point of view.  The result is
almost inevitably a series of monographs, individually, perhaps, of high
authority, but related to one another only by being bound in the same covers.
A general history of the religions of civilised peoples can, in the nature of
the case, be only an introduction to the subject; for more extensive and
detailed knowledge of any particular religion recourse must be had to works on
a larger scale written by scholars of special equipment.  And for the uses of
such an introduction, unity of method and of point of view, and the wider
outlook gained by the comparative study of many religions, may perhaps to some
extent offset the greater independence and authority obtained by
collaboration.

     To enable the reader to pursue the study of individual religions or of
special aspects of them, the literature has been given with some fulness and
to many of the titles brief notes are appended, indicating the scope and
character of the work.

     One of the minor perplexities of a volume like this is how to spell the
foreign words, especially proper names, from a variety of languages. The
principle adopted is to give familiar names in the most common English form,
and to write the rest in a way approximating as nearly to the pronunciation as
our alphabet permits; the refinements of diacritical points are intelligible
only to the scholar, who does not need them.  The vowels are meant to have
their so-called continental sounds; the consonants are to be pronounced as in
English, with one or two exceptions: In Indian and Persian words c is
pronounced like English ch, and c nearly as English sh; the German ach sound
is represented by kh.  In Chinese words the aspirate, which is often
distinctive, is written with a turned apostrophe ('); e (as in Chuang-tsze) is
a very short neutral vowel.  In the chapters on Buddhism some difficulty is
made by the fact that many names have become established in English in the
Sanskrit, or artificially Sanskritised forms of the texts in which the
Buddhist scriptures were first known, and Sanskrit forms are still generally
given in versions from the Chinese, while the Pali forms of the southern canon
are preferred by many recent scholars.  It is believed that the compromises
adopted will be easily understood; in some less obvious cases the
identification is made in the index.  Convenience has throughout been given
precedence over consistency.

     In conclusion I wish gratefully to acknowledge the counsel and assistance
I have received in the long course of these studies from many scholars; and in
particular to Mr. E. B. Drew, of Cambridge, formerly Commissioner of Chinese
Imperial Maritime Customs, who was kind enough to read the chapters on China
and lend me his aid about Chinese names; to Professor A. V. Williams Jackson,
of Columbia University, who gave the chapters on Zoroastrianism the benefit of
his most competent criticism; and to my colleague, Professor Charles R.
Lanman, to whose wide and exact learning I have often appealed - never in vain
- and who was so good as to submit the chapters on India to his pains-taking
scrutiny, and to suggest numerous improvements.  I am much indebted also to
Mr. Albert H. Moore, of Washington, D.C. who assisted me throughout in the
preparation of the manuscript, and whose close observation detected many
inaccuracies and obscurities which might otherwise have escaped me, and to my
wife, who has helped me in many ways both in making the book and in carrying
it through the press.

     Cambridge, Mass., October 12, 1913.