Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 12.djvu/406

vidual must be seen out-of-doors; no dog must bark, no pig must grunt, no cock must crow. . . . On these occasions they tied up the mouths of the dogs and pigs, and put the fowls under a calabash, or fastened a piece of cloth over their eyes."

 

And how completely the idea of transgression was associated in the mind of the Sandwich-Islander with breach of ceremonial observance, is shown in the fact that "if any one made a noise on a tabu-day. . . . he must die." Through stages considerably advanced, religion continues to be thus constituted. When questioning the Nicaraguans concerning their creed, Oviedo, eliciting the fact that they confessed, their sins to an appointed old man, asks what sort, of sins they confessed; and the first clause of the answer is, "We tell him when we have broken our festivals and not kept them." Similarly of the Peruvians, we read that "the most notable sin was neglect in the service of the huacas" (spirits, etc.); and a large part of life was spent in propitiating the apotheosized dead. How elaborate the observances, how frequent the festivals, how lavish was the expenditure, by which, among the ancient Egyptians, the good-will of supernatural beings was sought, the records everywhere show us; and that with them religious duty consisted in thus ministering to the desires of ancestral ghosts, deified in various degrees, we are shown by the prayer of Rameses to his father Amnion, in which he claims his help in battle because of the many bulls he has sacrificed to him. With the Hebrews in pre-Mosaic times it was the same. As Kuenen remarks', the "great work and enduring merit" of Moses was that he gave dominance to the moral element in religion. In his reformed creed, "Jahveh is distinguished from the rest of the gods in this, that he will be served, not merely by sacrifices and feasts, but also, nay, in the first place, by the observance of the moral commandments." That the piety of the Greeks included diligent performance of rites at tombs, and that the Greek god was especially angered by non-observance of propitiatory ceremonies, are familiar facts; and credit with a god was claimed by the Trojan as by the Egyptian, not on account of rectitude, but on account of oblations made; as is shown by Chryses's prayer to Apollo. So, too, Christianity, originally a renewed development of the ethical element at the expense of the ceremonial element, losing as it spread those early traits which distinguished it from lower creeds, displayed, in mediæval Europe, a relatively large amount of ceremony and a relatively small amount of morality. Of the seventy-three chapters constituting the Rule of St. Benedict, nine concern the moral and general duties of the brothers, while thirteen concern the religious ordinances. And how the idea of criminality attached to disregard of ordinances is proved by the following passage from the Rule of St. Columbanus:

"A year's penance for him who loses a consecrated wafer; six months for him who suffers it to be eaten by mites; twenty days for him who lets it turn