It seemed to him, looking back in the beginning of faiths, that morals,
that rules of life had no part there. When the Northman saw Thor in the
thunder there was no moral code there. The Greek gods were frankly not
so much immoral, which predicates a code of morals, as unmoral. They
knew of no such thing. It is the same with all the early gods, with the
Hindu gods and those of all other early beliefs. The Chin savage on the
Burmese frontier sees gods in the great peaks, but these gods demand
from him no moral observance, they impress upon him no moral standard.
All that the early gods demanded was fear, reverence, worship. Even the
Jehovah of the Jews asked at first only this. It is not till you get to
the third commandment that conduct comes in, and the moral code was
scanty. The early gods of all kinds, of all faiths, had no moral code
either for themselves or man. They demanded only obedience and fear and
worship. The moral code came later.
It seems unnecessary now to consider whence they came, how they grew,
why they became added to the worship of the gods, which was all that
early religion meant. Some of that will come elsewhere. It is immaterial
here which is only the man's search after a code, any code that would
act. For it remains that all faiths when once they had left the
elementary stage did add a code of conduct as part of their religion,
saying it came from God, or was an immutable law, and tried to induce
men to follow it by declaring that it alone would lead to happiness
hereafter. All the greater faiths have these codes. "And I," said the
man to himself as he searched, "I care nothing whence the code is
supposed to have come, truly or falsely, as long as I find it. I want a
guide to life as it is. Has any faith such a guide? For each declare
that it alone has. Show me these rules to life."
The books showed him. They showed him codes of all degrees, from the
simplest to the most complex, from the plain cult of courage, the very
first and most necessary of all virtues, to the immensely complicated
code of observances of the Brahmin; and outside religions there were the
philosophies of Greece and Rome, of India and China, of Persia and
Germany, and Scotland.
Now should man so order his life as to live righteously here, and to be
of good repute before man and his own conscience? How shall a man so
form himself here that if indeed there be a life hereafter he may enter
it without fear? What are these codes?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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