On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History | Page 4

mean
here the church-creed which he professes, the articles of faith which he
will sign and, in words or otherwise, assert; not this wholly, in many
cases not this at all. We see men of all kinds of professed creeds attain
to almost all degrees of worth or worthlessness under each or any of
them. This is not what I call religion, this profession and assertion;
which is often only a profession and assertion from the outworks of the
man, from the mere argumentative region of him, if even so deep as
that. But the thing a man does practically believe (and this is often
enough without asserting it even to himself, much less to others); the
thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain,
concerning his vital relations to this mysterious Universe, and his duty
and destiny there, that is in all cases the primary thing for him, and
creatively determines all the rest. That is his religion; or, it may be, his
mere scepticism and no-religion: the manner it is in which he feels
himself to be spiritually related to the Unseen World or No-World; and
I say, if you tell me what that is, you tell me to a very great extent what

the man is, what the kind of things he will do is. Of a man or of a
nation we inquire, therefore, first of all, What religion they had? Was it
Heathenism,--plurality of gods, mere sensuous representation of this
Mystery of Life, and for chief recognized element therein Physical
Force? Was it Christianism; faith in an Invisible, not as real only, but as
the only reality; Time, through every meanest moment of it, resting on
Eternity; Pagan empire of Force displaced by a nobler supremacy, that
of Holiness? Was it Scepticism, uncertainty and inquiry whether there
was an Unseen World, any Mystery of Life except a mad one;--doubt
as to all this, or perhaps unbelief and flat denial? Answering of this
question is giving us the soul of the history of the man or nation. The
thoughts they had were the parents of the actions they did; their
feelings were parents of their thoughts: it was the unseen and spiritual
in them that determined the outward and actual;--their religion, as I say,
was the great fact about them. In these Discourses, limited as we are, it
will be good to direct our survey chiefly to that religious phasis of the
matter. That once known well, all is known. We have chosen as the
first Hero in our series Odin the central figure of Scandinavian
Paganism; an emblem to us of a most extensive province of things. Let
us look for a little at the Hero as Divinity, the oldest primary form of
Heroism.
Surely it seems a very strange-looking thing this Paganism; almost
inconceivable to us in these days. A bewildering, inextricable jungle of
delusions, confusions, falsehoods, and absurdities, covering the whole
field of Life! A thing that fills us with astonishment, almost, if it were
possible, with incredulity,--for truly it is not easy to understand that
sane men could ever calmly, with their eyes open, believe and live by
such a set of doctrines. That men should have worshipped their poor
fellow-man as a God, and not him only, but stocks and stones, and all
manner of animate and inanimate objects; and fashioned for themselves
such a distracted chaos of hallucinations by way of Theory of the
Universe: all this looks like an incredible fable. Nevertheless it is a
clear fact that they did it. Such hideous inextricable jungle of
misworships, misbeliefs, men, made as we are, did actually hold by,
and live at home in. This is strange. Yes, we may pause in sorrow and
silence over the depths of darkness that are in man; if we rejoice in the

heights of purer vision he has attained to. Such things were and are in
man; in all men; in us too.
Some speculators have a short way of accounting for the Pagan religion:
mere quackery, priestcraft, and dupery, say they; no sane man ever did
believe it,--merely contrived to persuade other men, not worthy of the
name of sane, to believe it! It will be often our duty to protest against
this sort of hypothesis about men's doings and history; and I here, on
the very threshold, protest against it in reference to Paganism, and to all
other isms by which man has ever for a length of time striven to walk in
this world. They have all had a truth in them, or men would not have
taken them up. Quackery and dupery do abound; in religions, above all
in the more advanced decaying stages of religions, they have fearfully
abounded: but quackery was never the originating influence in