When crimes and sins, affairs of state and affairs of church thus overlap and commingle in primitive jurisprudence, it is no wonder if the functions of those who administer the law should tend to display a similar fusion of aspects.  The chief, or king, has a “divine right,” and is himself in one or another sense divine, even whilst he takes the lead in regard to all such matters as are primarily secular.  The earliest written codes, such as the Mosaic Books of the Law, with their strange medley of injunctions concerning things profane and sacred, accurately reflect the politico-religious character of all primitive authority.

Indeed, it is only by an effort of abstraction that the present chapter has been confined to the subject of law, as distinguished from the subject of the following chapter, namely, religion.  Any crime, as notably murder, and even under certain circumstances theft, is apt to be viewed by the ruder peoples either as a violation of taboo, or as some closely related form of sin.  Nay, within the limits of the clan, legal punishment can scarcely be said to be in theory possible; the sacredness of the blood-tie lending to any chastisement that may be inflicted on an erring kinsman the purely religious complexion of a sacrifice, an act of excommunication, a penance, or what not.  Thus almost insensibly we are led on to the subject of religion from the study of the legal sanction; this very term “sanction,” which is derived from Roman law, pointing in the same direction, since it originally stood for the curse which was appended in order to secure the inviolability of a legal enactment.

CHAPTER VIII RELIGION

“How can there be a History of Religions?” once objected a French senator.  “For either one believes in a religion, and then everything in it appears natural; or one does not believe in it, and then everything in it appears absurd!”

This was said some thirty years ago, when it was a question of founding the now famous chair of the General History of Religions at the College de France.  At that time, such chairs were almost unheard of.  Now-a-days the more important universities of the world, to reckon them alone, can show at least thirty.

What is the significance of this change?  It means that the parochial view of religion is out of date.  The religious man has to be a man of the world, a man of the wider world, an anthropologist.  He has to recognize that there is a “soul of truth” in other religions besides his own.

It will be replied—­and I fully realize the force of the objection—­that history, and therefore anthropology, has nothing to do with truth or falsehood—­in a word, with value.  In strict theory, this is so.  Its business is to describe and generalize fact; and religion from first to last might be pure illusion or even delusion, and it would be fact none the less on that account.