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portion of the chief." The Miamis have among them a clan of man-eaters whose hereditary duty and privilege it is to devour the bodies of prisoners burned to death. The act has a religious character, and is attended with ceremonial observances. It is much the same among the New Zealanders. "Of the slain," says a Maori chief, some are cooked and eaten. The first man killed is made sacred to the Atua, in order to propitiate him. He is thus disposed of. His heart is cut out and stuck on the top of a post. His ear and some of the hair of his head are preserved to be used at the ceremony called Feed-wind. The ear is for the female Ariki of the tribe to eat in the ceremony called Ruahine, by which the war party are made free. The heart is for the male Ariki to eat at the ceremony called Tautane. The second person slain is also sacred, the priest alone being permitted to eat his flesh."2

The notion that the consumption of the heart or blood of a brave man communicates valour to the consumer is simple and natural enough. The idea of sacred communion is more complex. The victim being made over to the god, becomes part, so to speak, of the god, and by the communicant feeding on the victim he becomes a partaker thereby of that which not only belongs to God, but is assimilated into God. The victim is, what Hegel would call, the synthetic moment between the mutual contradictories God and man.

The act of sacrifice is always regarded as uniting most intimately the victim with the god. Thus, Tohil, the Moloch of the Quiches, we have seen in the preceding 1 Parkman: Jesuits in Canada, p. xxxix.

2 Shorthand: Traditions of New Zealand, p. 247; 1856.

chapter demanding the union of the native tribes with him. This they accept, and discover when too late that this union signifies the sacrifice of themselves. The partaking of the sacrifice is regarded as the union of the votary with the god, by union with the victim, and it is on this theory that a sacramental eating almost invariably forms the complement of every sacrificial act.

CHAPTER XX

THE HUMAN IDEALS

The necessity of an Ideal-When God is the essence of abstraction, heroworship steps in-Types of heroes worshipped-The theory of heroworship-The ideal of beauty-of dignity-The female ideal-Mary, the Christian female ideal.

[ABITS make the man, and habits obtain through imitation. If man has a good pattern before him, he will copy that; if provided with a bad one, he will grow up with habits that are bad. An ideal is necessary to him as a progressive animal. If he is to advance, he must see something ahead of him to attract him forward. He must believe that imperfection is not essential, and that perfection is obtainable. To form an ideal is to refuse acquiescence in facts, to feel conviction that circumstances are made by man, and not man by circumstances. The tendency of the mind to exaggerate is a manifestation of the faculty of idealization. A brute never supposes anything to be better or worse than it really is. But not so man: he pitches his conception of good and bad above experience; he is disposed to enhance the virtues or vices of every person with whom he is acquainted, so that it is always a disappointment and a surprise to him when he finds that his estimate has exceeded what exists.

In the first Theopoeic age God was every quality idealized; but as the only qualities then appreciated were envy,

rage, and force, God was regarded as the most envicus, furious, and powerful existence conceivable. When, however, the notion of God was disengaged from human passions, and became more and more absolute, it lost its qualification as the ideal of humanity, and remained the ideal of abstract qualities; then arose hero-worship, a necessary reaction, for God having ceased to be human, deified mortals were elevated to the position of exemplars, vacated by God.

The ideal is formed by purifying human nature, by abstracting from it all that is odious and imperfect, and by sublimating all that is good. This abstraction is not arbitrary, but is determined by the point of view at which men stand: such as is their mode of living, such is their mode of thought, and such also is their mode of abstraction. This abstraction is at once affirmative and negative. What man esteems, that is to him God. The Mexican deified salt, and the Finn adored the wash-tub. What is imperfect is rejected, what is essential is distinguished from what is accidental, what is good from what is bad. When the Deity becomes the essence of intellectual qualities of order, volition, and wisdom, he ceases to be idealized human nature, and men seek in a middle region between earth and heaven an ideal of love, courage, beauty, and justice. The conception of an absolute intelligence is too frigid, too remote from man, for him to be able to take it to heart. He demands a sensible object about which his imagination may play, and this he finds either in the deification of man, or in the incarnation of God.

Almost all religions present us with examples of heroworship, for this reason, that human types of excellence are necessary for the education of man. Where no hero-worship exists, there we find no advance in civilization; for those few races who are without human ideals are thereby

destitute of incentives to perfection. The lowest type of deified hero is the man of vast bodily strength. Every nation has its ideal of brute force, who strangles serpents, tears lions, and kills hosts of enemies. The type is higher when the hero exercises his great strength in freeing his native land from robbers, dragons, and other noxious beasts. Such are Perseus, Mithras, Feridun, Sigfrid, Herakles, S. George. Another ideal is the hero who makes great discoveries which benefits the race, a Prometheus who teaches men how to kindle fire, a Cadmon who introduces letters, a Quetzalcoatl, an Oannes, a Hu Cadarn, who teach men how to plough and sow corn, a Dædalus or a Votan who invents sails, a Völundr who discovers the art of forging iron. A higher type, again, is the great and wise reformer and lawgiver inspired of God—a Buddha, a Moses, a Zarathustra, a Mohammed.

A very favourite type of hero is the great, wealthy, and powerful king under whose sway the land had rest, or achieved conquests, when gold was as silver, and silver as brass, and brass as iron. And though all this splendour may have been produced by severe taxation, the memory of after ages recalls the magnificence, but forgets the misery. Solomon's reign was one of lavish pomp, and the traditions of the Jews to this day circle around him as the central figure in a golden age, yet the exactions of Solomon brought about a rupture between the tribes constituting his kingdom.

Often the golden age of a nation is not only in the past, but also looms in the future, and the prince who reigned in the first age is supposed to be about to reappear in the second.

A nation that suffers clings to the traditions of the past, and hopes for the future. The present is to it one of bitter

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