In some nations the kings have claimed for themselves the highest prerogatives of the priestly function. This is the case with the king of Loango and others in Africa. In America a marked instance was the Inca of Peru, who was head of the sacerdotal as well as the civil govern ment. This at times brought with it inconveniences. In one of the tribes of the Upper Nile the king is also high priest and rainmaker-in chief. He is supposed to summon the clouds by whistling for them. But he must exercise this function with due caution, for if he whistles for them and they come not, he is looked upon as an usurper and is forthwith led out and knocked on the head.
For many dynasties the priesthood of ancient Egypt was wholly sub servient to the ruling king, who was its acknowledged head and recognized as the vicegerent of God on earth. This union of powers was one of the strongly consolidating features of the Pharaonic government. When about the twentieth dynasty the function of the priests became hereditary in families, and the sacerdotal class separated from the laity on the one side and on the other became independent of the royal control, with offi cials of their own, a change had been introduced fatal to the permanence of the royal house and highly injurious to the culture of the people at large (Tiele).
Mysteries and Secret all instances the weight of a priest hood is cast in favor of exclusiveness and conservatism. The priests claim to possess private knowledge and powers, which they naturally seek to keep from the profane multitude. This led to the establishment of secret orders, learned guilds, and mysteries. Those of Elensis, patterned largely on Egyptian models it is believed, are familiar to all readers of the classics. Similar organizations are found in the rudest tribes. The Algonkin In dians have their " Big Medicine Lodge," which introduces the neophyte to mysteries doubtless quite as impressive as those at Eleusis. The Dako tas have a number of secret societies presided over by their tribal sorcerers, each supposed to have knowledge of a number of roots and plants and other substances possessing magic pcwer.
Religion and this brief summary of the main features of religions we have incidentally referred several times to the part they have played in the history of national culture. We shall now sum up with equal brevity the various influences which are at work in every religion, no matter how rude, tending to foster the growth of the better nature of man.
Influence on one of his pregnant lines the poet Tenny son sums up the forces of individual culture in the words " self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control." All religions demand at least the last of these, and none more than those of the rudest stamp. The Eskimo, the Indian, or the Laplander who would secure for himself a guardian spirit must seek some deep solitude, and deny himself food and drink until lack of nourishment disorders his brain. The initiation to the religious mys teries of savages is usually connected with self-torture of the severest kind, which must be borne without a murmur. In the Aztec temples there was always provided a store of the sharp thorns of the maguey, with which the votaries were expected to pierce their ears, tongue, lips, and other sensi tive parts of their persons. Those who aspired to the priestly office car ried this self-mortification to a ghastly extent. A bas-relief discovered by
Charnay in one of the Yucatan cities represents the priest passing a jagged rope through his tongue. The priestly vocation frequently laid restric tion on the sexual life of its members, the males vowing chastity, the females seclusion; while the restrictions on marriage within the clan, in its origin of a purely religious nature, taught the savage to govern his desires in this their most uncontrollable direction. Although in themselves these acts of self-denial were generally absurd, they taught the inestimable lesson of self-government, and it came to be transmitted as an acquired element of culture to later generations.
Religion and National Unity. —As has been shown, most primitive relig ions are tribal, and the chief gods are the ideal representatives of the clan. In uniting to pay them homage all the members of the community tacitly repeat their acknowledgment of a solidarity of interests and blood. The stranger who is taken into the tribe becomes a member of it by wor shipping at the tribal shrine. "Thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God" (Ruth i. 16), was in effect the formula of all adoptions. The religious festivals which collected the scattered members of the band together at stated times maintained the alliance of blood and the recognition of common interests. The feeling that a nation should be under some one divine patron, who should be to it both a guardian of its folds and a defender of its cause, lived long after Christianity had become the religion of Europe. The war-cries of "St. George for England!" and " St. Denis for France!" rang out on many a stricken field Religion and the Resberi for Lau'.—The very absurdity and unreason ableness of many of the mandates of early religions had an educating effect on the rude populations to whom they were addressed. It taught them the habit of passive and prompt obedience to law, and thus formed a habit of mind essential to the preservation of the civil state. The taboo which the priest of the South Sea islands would lay on certain articles of diet, on places, even on the utterance of particular words, had to be observed on pain of death, and accustomed that race to a circumspect regard for edicts of all kinds. Legislators and magistrates have in all ages perceived the aid in the administration of justice which they can obtain by calling to their assistance the religious sentiment. Their main object being to reach the facts of a transaction, they have very generally brought in some relig ions solemnity to compel witnesses to speak the truth, if not out of respect to the human, then for the sake of divine, law. They may be of the most varied character: the Siberian Ostyak will bite a boar's head; the China man will cut off the head of a live chicken; the Brahman will take to witness the holy river Ganges; the Scotchman will raise his open hand toward the sky; the Englishman will kiss the cover of his sacred book: all these, and a hundred more intrinsically absurd and purposeless cus toms, are means of calling the wrath of the gods down upon the speaker if he tells either more or less than truth. They all indicate how law avails itself in some of its most valuable functions of the aid of religion.