A Comparative View of Religions | Page 8

the breathing of the deity.[5] The father of the house is priest, and the recognition by these races more than elsewhere of worth in woman is apparent also in their religion. In the description of the kingdom of the dead in the German-Norse mythology, Walhalla is the abode of the heroes, hell the gathering place of the other dead. Notwithstanding these still childish conceptions, there was revealed in the moral character and heroic spirit of the German forefathers the germ of a higher development, which makes the nations of Germany and Northern Europe capable beyond others of a constantly higher conception and estimation of the Christian religion.[6]
CHAPTER III.
THE RELIGION OF THE SEMITES.
I. THE PHOENICIANS, SYRIANS, BABYLONIANS, CARTHAGINIANS, AND ARABIANS.
In the Semitic races the religious spirit rose above nature-worship in the effort to separate God from nature, and to elevate him above nature as Lord, Baal (plural Baalim, either from the different places where he was worshiped, or the various names under which he was worshiped), Bel, El, Adon (Adonis). Thus Bel among the Babylonians, Baal among the Ammonites and Moabites, was the god of light, the lord of heaven, the creator of mankind, who had his throne above the clouds and was invoked on mountains.[7] Also the title Molech and Baal Molech to designate the Supreme Being among the ancient Phoenicians and Carthaginians, and the nations nearest related to Israel, the Moabites and Ammonites, as well as the derived names Milcom (Kamos) [Chemosh, Eng. ver.], among the Ammonites, and Melkartht at Tyre and Carthage, indicate, like Baal, an original effort to conceive God as the ruler of nature. Agreeing with this conception of the Deity, there is manifest, as well in the worship of Baal as of Molech and the female Astarte (Melecheth)[8] [Ashtaroth, Eng. ver.], worshiped with him, partly in the abstinence from marriage, partly in the human sacrifice, especially the sacrifice of the first-born, the aim, through abnegation of the life of sense, and through the sacrifice, even though unnatural, of what is dearest to man, to appease a divinity who as lord and governor rules and subjects to himself the power of nature and every propensity of sense.[9]
In spite of the effort to elevate the Deity as Lord and King above nature, most of the Semitic nations gradually sank back into the old nature-worship, and, uniting with the worship of the highest God, Baal and Bel, that of a female divinity under the names of Baaltis, Beltis, Aschera, Mylitta, they made religion to consist in the sacrifice of chastity to the will of the Deity, as the fruitful, productive power of nature, and thus fell into gross immorality.[10]
Religion appears in another form among the Semites in the worship of the stars among the Babylonians and ancient Arabians. This astrolatry, originally a kind of fetichism, became nature-worship, and gradually rose to the worship of the intelligence manifested to our contemplation in the movement of the heavenly luminaries. Astrology arose, and religion no longer expressed itself in passive acquiescence, but was united with the effort to guide the life by the knowledge to be drawn, as men imagined, from the motion of the stars.
ISRAELITISH RELIGION.
a. Its origin. The patriarchal religion. Mosaism. Prophetism.
While most of the Semitic nations, in opposition to the effort to elevate God above nature as lord and governor, returned to the old nature-religion with its grossly sensual worship of the divine, and others got no farther than to the conception of a deity, who, like a consuming fire, stood opposed to nature, and was to be appeased and propitiated by human sacrifices, there was developed among the Israelitish people, gradually and in constantly higher measure, in connection with a higher moral and religious disposition, the worship of God as a being who, though distinct from nature, is yet not opposed to it, and thus no longer demands human sacrifices, but obedience and moral consecration.
The common origin of the religion of the Israelites and that of their Semitic relations, though hardly evident even in the oldest monuments of the Hebrew literature, appears from the following facts and particulars: firstly, the composition of Israelitish names not only with El, but also with Baal, such as Jerubbaal (adversary of Baal), (Gideon),[11] Esbaal,[12] Meribbaal,[13] names which afterwards, on account of the aversion which the ever-increasing distance in religion between the Israelitish nation and the nations related to it must, from the nature of the case, have inspired against the name of Baal, are changed into Jerubboseth,[14] Isboseth,[15] and Mephiboseth[16], as also the interchanging of El and Baal,[17] of Baal-jada[18] and Eljada,[19] seem to point to an ancient period when the name Baal (Lord) was used, like El, Elohim, El Eljon, El Schaddai, Adonai, even among the Israelites, to designate the Supreme Being. Secondly, the God of Abraham (Elohim), although he