As currently taught, no one of the three world-religions named is fully adequate on all these points. The cosmogony of Christianity is a series of Assyrian and Hebrew myths contradicted by modern science, and its ethical purity has been often sullied by efforts to place faith in dogmas above the law of conscience. Mohammedanism, a more genuine monotheism than Christianity, in some respects higher in practical morality (temperance, charity, equality), and certainly superior in power over the emotions, is weak in its doctrine of fatalism and in its degradation of woman. Buddhism is tainted by a profound distrust of the value of the individual life, by a false theory of the universe, and by its borrowed doctrine of metempsychosis; but rises high in its appeals to the sense of justice and right within the mind.
A religion tends to elevate its votaries in the proportion that it withdraws their minds from merely material aims, and sets before them stimulating ideals. This is the distinction between “material” and “ideal” cults. Where the rites are directed mainly to conjuration, where the prayers are for good luck in life, where the myths are mere stories of exaggerated human shapes, there the faith is material. Such were all the religions of the African blacks and of the Eastern and Northern Asiatic tribes. They have never developed any thing higher. Among the whites, however, and in a less degree among the American Indians, there were mythical ideal figures, ranked among the gods, who embodied grand ideal conceptions of the possible perfectibility of man, and served as examples and models for the religious sentiment.[33]
The associative influence of a religion, whether tribal or universal in theory, is singularly powerful. The Mohammedan who looks toward Mecca, the Christian who turns toward Rome, feels a like bond of sympathy with his fellow worshippers of every race and color, as did the Israelite who wended his way to Jerusalem, or the Nahuatl who travelled to the sacred city of Cholula. The pilgrimages, the Crusades, the ecclesiastical Councils of past ages, have collected nations together under the control of ideas stronger than any which practical life can offer.