Page:Primitive Culture Vol 2.djvu/385

creed, a sentiment which finds vent in characteristic prayers. Such are these from the Rig-Veda: 'Take away our calamities. By sacred verses may we overcome those who employ no holy hymns! Distinguish between the Aryas and those who are Dasyus: chastising those who observe no sacred rites, subject them to the sacrificer ... Indra subjects the impious to the pious, and destroys the irreligious by the religious.'^[1] The following is from the closing prayer which the boys in many schools in Cairo used to repeat some years ago, and very likely do still: 'I seek refuge with Allah from Satan the accursed. In the name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful ... O Lord of all creatures! O Allah! destroy the infidels and polytheists, thine enemies, the enemies of the religion! O Allah! make their children orphans, and defile their abodes, and cause their feet to slip, and give them and their families and their households and their women and their children and their relations by marriage and their brothers and their friends and their possessions and their race and their wealth and their lands as booty to the Moslems! O Lord of all creatures!'^[2] Another powerful tendency of civilization, that of regulating human affairs by fixed ordinance, has since early ages been at work to arrange worship into mechanical routine. Here, so to speak, religion deposits itself in sharply defined shape from a supersaturated solution, and crystallizes into formalism. Thus prayers, from being at first utterances as free and flexible as requests to a living patriarch or chief, stiffened into traditional formulas, whose repetition required verbal accuracy, and whose nature practically assimilated more or less to that of charms. Liturgies, especially in those three quarters of the world where the ancient liturgical language has become at once unintelligible and sacred, are crowded with examples of this historical process. Its extremest development in Europe is connected with the use of the rosary. This devotional

1. 'Rig- Veda,' i. 51, 8, x. 105, 8. Muir, 'Sanskrit Texts,' part ii. ch. iii.
2. Lane, 'Modern Egyptians,' vol. ii. p. 383.