Ten Great Religions | Page 9

world are evidently religions limited in some way to
particular races or nations. They are, as we have said, ethnic. We use
this Greek word rather than its Latin equivalent, gentile, because

gentile, though meaning literally "of, or belonging to, a race," has
acquired a special sense from its New Testament use as meaning all
who are not Jews. The word "ethnic" remains pure from any such
secondary or acquired meaning, and signifies simply that which
belongs to a race.
The science of ethnology is a modern one, and is still in the process of
formation. Some of its conclusions, however, may be considered as
established. It has forever set aside Blumenbach's old classification of
mankind into the Caucasian and four other varieties, and has given us,
instead, a division of the largest part of mankind into Indo-European,
Semitic, and Turanian families, leaving a considerable penumbra
outside as yet unclassified.
That mankind is so divided into races of men it would seem hardly
possible to deny. It is proved by physiology, by psychology, by
glossology, and by civil history. Physiology shows us anatomical
differences between races. There are as marked and real differences
between the skull of a Hindoo and that of a Chinaman as between the
skulls of an Englishman and a negro. There is not as great a difference,
perhaps, but it is as real and as constant. Then the characters of races
remain distinct, the same traits reappearing after many centuries exactly
as at first. We find the same difference of character between the Jews
and Arabs, who are merely different families of the same Semitic race,
as existed between their ancestors, Jacob and Esau, as described in the
Book of Genesis. Jacob and the Jews are prudent, loving trade,
money-making, tenacious of their ideas, living in cities; Esau and the
Arabs, careless, wild, hating cities, loving the desert.
A similar example of the maintaining of a moral type is found in the
characteristic differences between the German and Kelts, two families
of the same Indo-European race. Take an Irishman and a German,
working side by side on the Mississippi, and they present the same
characteristic differences as the Germans and Kelts described by
Tacitus and Cæsar. The German loves liberty, the Kelt equality; the one
hates the tyrant, the other the aristocrat; the one is a serious thinker, the
other a quick and vivid thinker; the one is a Protestant in religion, the

other a Catholic. Ammianus Marcellinus, living in Gaul in the fourth
century, describes the Kelts thus (see whether it does not apply to the
race now).
"The Gauls," says he, "are mostly tall of stature,[8] fair and red-haired,
and horrible from the fierceness of their eyes, fond of strife, and
haughtily insolent. A whole band of strangers would not endure one of
them, aided in his brawl by his powerful and blue-eyed wife, especially
when with swollen neck and gnashing teeth, poising her huge white
arms, she begins, joining kicks to blows, to put forth her fists like
stones from a catapult. Most of their voices are terrific and threatening,
as well when they are quiet as when they are angry. All ages are
thought fit for war. They are a nation very fond of wine, and invent
many drinks resembling it, and some of the poorer sort wander about
with their senses quite blunted by continual intoxication."
Now we find that each race, beside its special moral qualities, seems
also to have special religious qualities, which cause it to tend toward
some one kind of religion more than to another kind. These religions
are the flower of the race; they come forth from it as its best aroma.
Thus we see that Brahmanism is confined to that section or race of the
great Aryan family which has occupied India for more than thirty
centuries. It belongs to the Hindoos, to the people taking its name from
the Indus, by the tributaries of which stream it entered India from the
northwest. It has never attempted to extend itself beyond that particular
variety of mankind. Perhaps one hundred and fifty millions of men
accept it as their faith. It has been held by this race as their religion
during a period immense in the history of mankind. Its sacred books are
certainly more than three thousand years old. But during all this time it
has never communicated itself to any race of men outside of the
peninsula of India. It is thus seen to be a strictly ethnic religion,
showing neither the tendency nor the desire to become the religion of
mankind.
The same thing may be said of the religion of Confucius. It belongs to
China and the Chinese. It suits their taste and genius. They have had it
as their state religion for some