Forlong - Rivers of Life

8
Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
they fancied, as do the Polynesians of the present day, was a leaky covering, “dividing
the waters from the waters.” What could the glazed eye of infancy see of a
“Herschel’s starry depths,” and so comprehend, if even indeed desire to know, of a
God ruling those mighty systems, which travel their millions of miles an hour, far out
into spaces illimitable; and ever move by mysterious force, as with mathematical precision.
God understands his children best, and ever gives milk to babes and meat to strong men,
and so it is now and ever will be. “As thy civilisation or culture is, so shall thy gods
be,” seems written on man’s horoscope.
“All things,” says a powerful writer, “are the product of their conditions, and all
conditions have a right to exist, therefore the products have a right to exist also; and
the Maker of the conditions cannot in justice refuse to be satisfied with the products
of conditions which he has permitted.” 1 The poor soil and the arid sky are as much
a part of the universal order, as the rich garden, soft rain, and warm sunshine. It is
just that the one should yield a crop which the other would despise. It would be
unjust that both should yield alike. 2
Look for a moment at the heavens of different faiths. The good Theodore
Parker somewhere states, that if the Buffalo imagined a heaven, it would be a rice
wet meadow, covered with luxuriant grasses, in which roamed a large fat buffalo-
God; and Max Müller tells us that the Greenlander believes that when a man dies
his soul travels to Torngarsuk, the land where reigns perpetual summer, all sunshine
and no night; where there are good waters and birds, fish, seals and reindeer with-
out end, that are to be caught without trouble, or are even found conveniently cooking
alive in a huge kettle! The Greenlander’s soul’s journey is however difficult—
it slides, says Müller, five days down a precipice stained with the blood of those who
went before. It is especially grievous for the poor soul when the journey must be
made in winter or tempest, for it may then suffer what they call “the other death,”
when it perishes utterly and nothing is left; so that reaching this heaven is, after all,
only a chance, and like the predestination doctrine of the Christian faith, is a matter
foreordained by great Jove or Odin, and so beyond the creature’s power to control!
The New Hollander’s heaven is an abode of two good divinities, a delightful
place with plenty of game and food; no excess of heat or cold, rain or droughty, no
malignant spirits nor sickness, no death, but plenty of “rioting, singing, and dancing
for evermore!” Like Christians, the Australian believes in “an evil spirit dwelling
in the nethermost region,” though he declines to tell us what sort of place this is, or
where: His Satan, however , has, like that at his Antipodes, horns and a tale!
All religions begin with offerings and sacrifices to some great spirit—this in
Europe became Mercury, or Bode, or Wode, and to him the Teuton and Gaul, or
Celt, offered human victims, had open or uncovered temples, consecrated groves, worshipped
oaks and the ash, and performed auspicial rites.
1 “Cantab,” Scott’s Series.
2 “The Pilgrim and the Shrine.”