religious liberties which all Americans Pagan Prophecies of enjoy, and which the President has specified in the first of the above two extracts; the second should pledge to them a Territorial form of government, in which they should be represented in a popular assembly elected by the people on some basis of just and equal suffrage; the third should promise that this civil government should take the place of the military government as soon as the guerrilla warfare ceases and peace is sufficiently restored to make adequate and practicable protection of life, property, and liberty without military law; the fourth should reserve for determination the question of the final relation between the Philippine Archipelago to the United States until the guerrilla war ceases, the civil government is established, and the real wishes of the Filipinos can be ascertained in a peaceful and orderly manner. as a Doubtless an amendment would be introduced by the Democratic party substituting for the last of these clauses a clause in harmony with the Democratic platform that is, a declaration promising immediate independence as soon stable form of government has been secured. Doubtless also this amendment would be voted down by the Republican majority. We can hardly think it doubtful that Democrats would then agree with Republicans in promising the Filipinos at least liberty and self-government, so that this guarantee would be that, not of a dominant party, but of the entire Nation. To such a guarantee the Filipinos are entitled. Such a guarantee ought to be given them by unanimous consent at once. The right of the Filipinos to liberty and self-government ought not to be made dependent on the question whether they are ready also for national independence. We cannot doubt that action by Congress, guaranteeing in the name of the Nation the implied but unauthoritative promise of the President and the recommendation of the Philippine Commission, would do something, perhaps much, to satisfy those Filipinos who are anxious only for the welfare of their people, and are willing to see that welfare secured by any plan which will assure the people their civil and religious liberties and such a share in the government as will help to make that assurance doubly sure. Christianity Origin of Religions," with an introduction by I have just read "Aryan Sun-Myths the Charles Morris, author of " The Aryan Race." From much subject-matter of like import therein contained I give the following: "The Persian sun-god Mithras (born December 25) was said to be the Logos, also the Anointed, or the Christ, and was called the Lamb of God. His worshipers addressed him in their litany: O Lamb of God! that taketh away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us. sun-god Osiris, as second person of the Grant us thy peace.' The Egyptian Trinity, was called the Word. The monogram of Osiris is X and P in combination, and is now used as the monogram of Jesus Christ. Horus, another Egyptian name for the sun, was said to be born of the immaculate virgin Isis (the moon), on December 25. . . . It was said that he performed many miracles, among them the raising of the dead. He was finally slain, and descended into Hell. In three days he rose from the dead and ascended into Heaven. Serapis was another Egyptian sungod, whose followers were called Christians and Bishops of Christ. The sun-god Dionysus (Bacchus) was born on the twenty-fifth of December. . . . He performed many miracles, . among them being the turning of water into wine.... Like Moses, Bacchus was represented as horned. He was called the Law giver, his laws being written on two tables of stone.... The monogram of Bacchus, I. H. S., is now used as the monogram of Jesus Christ, and is wrongfully supposed to stand for Jesus Hominum Salvator, or In Hoc Signo. The Mexican sun-god, or savior, Quetzalcoatles, was crucified. He descended into Hell and rose from the dead. The Scandinavians and Mexicans believed in a Trinity. Many of the saviors of ancient nations were considered as suffering saviors, dying for the sins of their people." If these statements are true, what is the significance of the fact that the same ideas are so largely incorporated into the Christian religion? Granting that they are reliable, the inference would be that the Christian religion is but the latest edition or reproduction of former similar religions, instead of the unique system which we have supposed. P. The statements referred to are partly true and partly false; also they are partly not pertinent. We are unable to discover any ancient Persian liturgical forms containing the petition quoted by our correspondent. The Avesta, in the form in which we now have it, is post-Christian. The canon of Zoroastrian sacred writings was revised shortly after the Council of Nicea. Those writings obviously contain Greek, Buddhist, and Gnostic Christian elements. How far they have been influenced by Christianity has not yet been determined. It is not correct to say that the Egyptian gods Osiris, Isis, and Horus constituted a trinity in the accepted sense of that word. They were a triad or group of three. Where the pantheistic base of the Egyptian religion was felt, these three were recognized as one with the divine Substance of nature, but that notion has nothing in common with the Christian idea of the Holy Trinity. The cult of Serapis was eclectic, and, in its later stage of development, was strongly modified by the Christian Gnostics. It is possible that the terms quoted could have been used in some sense by them, though we have never seen the evidence of such a use. Isis was not, according to the ancient belief or myths of Egypt, an "immaculate virgin," but the wife of Osiris. The idea of the hypostatic Word does seem to have been developed to some extent from the idea of God by many ancient peoples, and this is only what could be expected. At the same time, it should be remembered that some students of ethnic religions have been misled by the fact that those whom they questioned endeavored to supply them with whatever answers were supposed to be desired. This happened to Sir William Jones in India, to early Roman Catholic missionaries in America, and to Christian missionaries among the North American Indians. So concerning the legendary teachings of Quetzalcoatl a Roman Catholic missionary writes: "So closely did they resemble the precepts of Jesus that nothing was lacking in them but His name and that of His Father." The worthy padre may have unintentionally suggested the answers. It is, however, undoubtedly true that there were startling coincidences between primitive Christianity and the pagan religions, the cause of which it is easy to between the old and the new, or to retain the old forms and give to them a new significance. Much confusion, especially in symbolism, and many coincidences between Christian and pagan symbolism, were due to the Christian Gnostics, who endeavored to rationalize theology and to harmonize paganism and Christianity. To this fact some of the parallels referred to by our correspondent are due. But to answer all his questions in detail would require a minute and extended examination of the religions of the world, with at chronological account of their developments. Some idea of the development of the God-consciousness in heathenism and in Christianity can be obtained from Brinton's "Religions of Primitive Peoples" and Wood's "Survivals in Christianity." We may say generally that it is undoubtedly true that the ethnic religions affected both the philosophy and the phraseology of primitive Christianity. How far primitive Christianity affected the sacred books of the ethnic religions is yet to be determined. But there is no reason to think that primitive Christianity was, in its essential principles or its vital spirit, borrowed from the ethnic religions. It is, however, true that certain essential elements are common to all religions and therefore find expression in common or analogous symbols. All human beings have the idea of God. As humankind dwelt with sincerity and devoutness upon this idea which is the sum of all truth, like a wonderful blossom it opened petal after petal during the ages. Hence, many myths and religious symbols of nations wide apart and sundered by oceans have similar forms and cognate significations; for the God-consciousness of men gradually evolved from the one idea the Idea of God. St. Paul tells us this truth in his profound sermon on Mars Hill. All men worship God, but some in a grotesque and erroneous fashion. They have lost their earlier and simpler faith, so that the divine idea has no longer for them a moral impetus and inspiration. Perhaps this has been due to their willful error at some point in their religious progress. Nevertheless, all are God's children, and have not by him been left without witness or testimony. The distinctive work of Jesus was that he came at that period in the process of religious thought when the world was able to receive his message in all its clearness, and to feel its spiritual and ethical power. Thereafter men were not left to grope (to use St. Paul's term) after the AllFather; for Jesus manifested in his life and words the character of the Eternal. He gathered up into one all the partial truths gained by the God-consciousness of mankind. He unified and set in their relations and proportions what of truth there was in polytheism, monotheism, and pantheism, and added a manifestation of divine life in his own Person which was unique and supreme. Above all, he taught with authority, so that the world may forever be sure what is divine revelation and what is error. The significance of the similarity of ethnic myths, customs, legends, and symbols with some of those in use in the Christian Church is that the notions which they stand for belong to the idea of God, and that the events of the Gospel narrative were not casual but the consummation of a revelation of God before made in fragmentary and often illcomprehended forms in the human consciousness. Jesus Christ is not the only revelation of God; he is the completion and consummation of all preceding revelations. The Living God It was said not long ago of a contemporary spiritual teacher that he believed that God guided him as directly as he had guided Moses; and this comment was made with bated breath, as if there were something sacrilegious in the idea. It is easy, apparently, for many people to believe in God historically, but difficult for them to believe in him contemporaneously. Even so great a mind as Carlyle's, with the creative imagination which is the eye of the soul, could see God at any time before the age of Luther and John Knox, but was utterly unable to recognize Him in the nineteenth century. A great many people find no difficulty in believing that the Jews were divinely led in all their wonderful history, but have great difficulty in believing that God has any thing to do with modern nations, or with the direction of modern race movements; and yet the student of history knows full well that the story of almost every nation is as suggestive of divine leadership, of moral forces working out moral results, as was the story of the Jew. Looking back now, it is clear enough that the Greek and the Roman had as definite work to do in the world as the Jew had, and that their work was quite as essential to the revelation of the divine nature and the disclosure of the human spirit. These are, in fact, the two great facts of history: the disclosure of God to man and the discovery of man to himself. Some races make their revelation in one field and some in the other; but every nation has its revelation to make, and the glory of God and the good of man were served alike by the Jew, the Greek, and the Roman; as they are served in modern times by the Italian, the German, the Frenchman, the Englishman, and the American. A living God in a living world, working through a living race, is the only intelligible and inspiring conception of life. If it were possible to believe that the divine interest in man had abated one jot, or that the divine will was in any smallest measure less operative than in the earlier times, no man could arrest his progress toward atheism, for the world must move toward God or move away from him; and practically it is a matter of small consequence whether the world is without God, or whether God is losing his hold on the world and the world is losing its hold on God: either alternative would mean atheism. It is not irreverent to say that God is more in the world to-day than ever before, because the world has a truer conception of his nature—that is, he guides uncounted multitudes of modern men more directly than he guided Abraham, because they enter more completely into the divine mind, and ally themselves more harmoniously with the divine purposes. In this fact lies the hope of humanity. The awful picture of the dead God whom Heine saw borne through the streets in the Viaticum, and stood by with uncovered head, has no semblance of reality; it is a living God, not a dying God, upon whose face men look in their dreams, their aspirations, and their faith; a God who is constantly coming more clearly into human consciousness, whose great and beneficent plans are slowly but certainly unfolding themselves in the vision of those who have the eyes of the spirit. The Spectator The Spectator is ashamed to confess that before he went to California lately he knew nothing about the old Spanish Missions. That is to say, he had read "Ramona," like everybody else, and forgotten it, and had a vague idea of the padres (were they Jesuits or not? he really did not know), and a general impression that their work was begun among the Indians at about the same period that the Jesuit fathers of Canada were laboring among the Iroquois. It was something of a shock, in consequence, to learn, with his first Mission-the Mission Dolores, on its hilly street in San Francisco-that not one of the California Missions (which are Franciscan, not Jesuit, by the way) is a hundred and fifty years old, and that San Francisco Solano, to the north, was established only in 1824. Padre Junipero, otherwise Michael Joseph Serra, was actually contemporary with Benjamin Franklin, and did not establish his first Mission in California (at San Diego de Alcalá) until 1769-the year which saw the birth of both Napoleon and Wellington. It was in 1833 that the Mexican Government "secularized" the Missions, converting them into mere modern parishes, and appointing administrators to take charge of their temporal possessions a proceeding which completely ruined them. So the whole Mission period, that lamented Golden Age of California, occupied only sixty-four years, and was as modern as the Declaration of Independence or the battle of Waterloo. This was not hard to realize at the little Mission Dolores, hemmed in nowadays by modern streets, and overshadowed by a large, new, and hideous parish church just beside it, and a larger parish academy across the way. But it became a different thing entirely at San Gabriel, and El Carmelo de Monterey, and Santa Barbara, and San Luis Rey, and, above all, at San Juan de Capistrano," that Melrose Abbey of the West," whose ruins-shaken by one day's earthquake in 1825 to pre cisely the most picturesque point of decay as well as centuries of crumbling could have done it-are worth the whole transcontinental journey to see under the full moon. These towers and arcades, these churches once gathering submissive settlements at their feet and ruling them with the power of life and death, do not belong to the eighteenth but to the fourteenth century. The very names of some of the old Missions are truly "like a mocking-bird's trill." Take the college founded at Santa Ynez-" Colegio Seminario de Maria Santisima de Guadulupe de Santa Ynez de California." Those liquid sounds belong to the poetry of the past, though the college was founded two centuries and more later than the landing of the Pilgrims. And how quaint is the legend of Padre Gutierra, one of the founders of Santa Ynez itself, who, suffering from an obscure. disease which no physician could heal, was told by his Indian neophytes of a rare and cunning viper, which sought to elude all human search, but whose skin was an absolute cure for such ills. For two years Padre Gutierra sought day and night, with prayer and toil, for the mythical viper, but in vain. Crazed by his search, the poor padre returned to Mexico, and no more of him is known. The native Indian, though he was improved and civilized by the Missions, must have had rather a dull time therein. Mass before dawn, breakfast of ground barley or corn-meal at sunrise, then work in the fields until noon, a simple meal of meat and frijoles, work again until five, and the Angelus at six to call him to prayers-that was a Mission Indian's life from one year's end to another, though he was but one generation removed from the nomad, if not born a nomad himself. No more naked roving, and worshiping of tribal gods at altars on the hills, where, after fasts, and long wild whistles and cries, and the flaming of a huge bonfire for hours while the tribal dance went on around it, a great white snake would come out of the fire and reveal himself to his worshipers. No more hunting of deer, and fighting of tribe with tribe. The Mission believed, like Mrs. Glass, in first catching its hare; it offered presents-food if the natives were hungry, clothes if they were well fed and drew in its catechumens. Then, lo a high wall, and a most benevolent despotism. The Spectator especially noticed the remnant, at San Gabriel, of the great cactus hedge, dozens of feet thick, that used to hem in the Mission fields, orchards, pastures, mill, church, schools, and all-with an impenetrable barrier. The old priest in charge explained its uses. "The Indians of the hills, naked Indians, could not come through; it would have made, yes, ribbons of them. And the ones inside, they could not climb out. Besides, they were happy here. Plenty to wear, plenty to eat; the Mission was rich in those days. Now it is as you see it." And indeed it was pathetic to look about and see only a bit of ruined wall remaining of the old gateway, and only a ruined chimney left of the great mill. Here the Indians once lived in their tule huts, the bachelors in one place, the married couples in rancherias of their own, and the maidens in "nunneries" from which the good padres brought them out sometimes, so tradition says, in a body, to choose husbands from among ranks of much-embarrassed young neophytes, ranged as in a spelling-match along the walls of the chapel. It was always leap year in the Mission system, it appears. The resulting unions may have been happy enough, but every Mission had the same story the Indians dwindled, dwindled. The Spectator saw in the churchyard of Santa Ynez the spot where three thousand Indians are buried. Finally, buried. Finally, when all the available tribes around each Mission were brought in and converted, the prolific Spaniard or Mexican possessed the land, and throve apace. That was the Golden Age, indeed, for both padres and people. The Spectator would like to have been a traveler in California in the early days of the century, and to have ridden day by day down the State from San Francisco de Solano, the northernmost Mission, to the parent San Diego de Alcalá in the south. Strung like beads on a thread, a day's journey apart, the prosperous Missions would have welcomed him one after another, as they welcomed all wayfarers. Like the guest in the mediaval monastery, the Mission guest was free of all the padres had, and when he left, after as long or as short a stay as he pleased, a fresh horse and a guide were at his disposal. But one night (so tradition runs) a Jew came to San José Mission for shelter. The padres took him in, but the Indians, hearing that he was there, fled in terror to their huts, and hid for fear of the man who had crucified Christ. Even the Spanish children were infected with the panic, and the next day the poor Hebrew, with an escort of two soldiers, had to be sent hurriedly on his way before the feelings of the neighborhood could be quieted. San The Spectator found the successors of the old padres very hospitable and oblig ing. One he especially remembers at San Gabriel, who showed him the old carved and gilded altarpiece, brought from Spain, and also some delightful retired saints in a lumber-room of the Mission, whose images, being cracked and chipped, have been discarded in favor of newer ones, but still smile and stretch out a hand of benediction as one enters their retreat. The Spectator never got quite so near to a saint in his private life, so to speak, before, and was consequently impressed with their high-bred ease. Juan Capistrano had some discarded saints too, and old altar-cloths and vestments worth seeing. It is truly an exquisite ruin, and how the Indians ever built its stone arches and graceful transept is one of Padre Junipero's miracles. The Spectator found there, too, a pleasant legend of how Padre Zalvidea, after a toilsome life, retired to San Juan with mind much impaired by age, and used to wander about the Mission pastures discussing subtle theological problems with the cattle. One day, as he went meditating, prayer-book in hand, an irritated bull came along, making straight for him. The Indian neophytes laboring near called out in warning, but Padre Zalvidea never looked up until the animal was almost upon him, and then only waved his hand and cried out, “Begone, thou spirit of evil!" The astonished bull came to a standstill, regarded the padre for a moment, and then lowered his tail and trotted on, leaving him unharmed; and from that day great was the fame of Zalvidea among the Indians of the Mission! |
