Отрывок из книги
J. Estlin Carpenter
Published by Good Press, 2019
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All this, it is plain, rests upon history. When Confucius visited the seat of the imperial dynasty at the court of Chow, he studied with deep interest the arrangements for the great sacrifices to Heaven and Earth; he surveyed the ancestral temples in which the emperor offered his worship; he inspected the Hall of Light whose walls bore paintings of the sovereigns from the remotest times; and then he turned to his disciples with the remark: "As we use a glass to examine the forms of things, so must we study the past to understand the present." Comparison that confines itself solely to counting up resemblances here and there will be of small value. We cannot comprehend the real meaning of a single religious rite, a single sentence of any scripture, apart from the context to which it belongs. Acts and words alike issue out of experiences that may be hundreds of years old, and sum up generations, it may be whole ages, of a continuous process. To trace the successive forms of these changes, to describe the steps through which they have passed, is like making a chart of a voyage, and laying down the lines of continent and ocean, island and cape. Or just as the races of man are sorted, and their characteristics are enumerated without reference to the various causes which have produced their modifications, so geography and ethnography might companion hierography, the delineation of "the Sacred" in its concrete manifestations.
But behind the external evolution of a given religion, its modes of worship, its ministers, its doctrines, lie more complicated questions. What causes shaped these acts and moulded these beliefs? What elements of race are to be discerned in them? How can we account for the diversities between the religions of peoples belonging to a common stock, like those of India and those of ancient Italy? What have been the effects of climate, of the struggle with alien peoples and new environment? How does the food-supply influence the formation of religious ideas? What contacts have been felt with other races, and what positive loans or more impalpable influences have passed from one side to the other? We, find here in hierology, the science of "the Sacred," an analogue to the reasoning which accounts for the distribution of land and water, the rise of mountain ranges and the sculpture of valleys and river-beds out of the stratification of the earth's crust, and builds up a science of geology; or which traces the results of migration upon peoples, the consequences of inter-marriage with other tribes, the disastrous issues of war, surveys the immense variety of causes which have contributed to new developments of racial energy, and arranges this knowledge in the science of ethnology.
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