It seemed to him, looking back in the beginning of faiths, that morals, that rules of life had no part there. When the Northman saw Thor in the thunder there was no moral code there. The Greek gods were frankly not so much immoral, which predicates a code of morals, as unmoral. They knew of no such thing. It is the same with all the early gods, with the Hindu gods and those of all other early beliefs. The Chin savage on the Burmese frontier sees gods in the great peaks, but these gods demand from him no moral observance, they impress upon him no moral standard. All that the early gods demanded was fear, reverence, worship. Even the Jehovah of the Jews asked at first only this. It is not till you get to the third commandment that conduct comes in, and the moral code was scanty. The early gods of all kinds, of all faiths, had no moral code either for themselves or man. They demanded only obedience and fear and worship. The moral code came later.
It seems unnecessary now to consider whence they came, how they grew, why they became added to the worship of the gods, which was all that early religion meant. Some of that will come elsewhere. It is immaterial here which is only the man's search after a code, any code that would act. For it remains that all faiths when once they had left the elementary stage did add a code of conduct as part of their religion, saying it came from God, or was an immutable law, and tried to induce men to follow it by declaring that it alone would lead to happiness hereafter. All the greater faiths have these codes. "And I," said the man to himself as he searched, "I care nothing whence the code is supposed to have come, truly or falsely, as long as I find it. I want a guide to life as it is. Has any faith such a guide? For each declare that it alone has. Show me these rules to life."
The books showed him. They showed him codes of all degrees, from the simplest to the most complex, from the plain cult of courage, the very first and most necessary of all virtues, to the immensely complicated code of observances of the Brahmin; and outside religions there were the philosophies of Greece and Rome, of India and China, of Persia and Germany, and Scotland.