Yet the classical religion is a mild and
tender specimen of the preserved religions. To get at the worst, you
should look where the destroying competition has been least--at
America, where sectional civilisation was rare, and a pervading
coercive civilisation did not exist; at such religions as those of
the Aztecs.
At first sight it seems impossible to imagine what conceivable
function such awful religions can perform in the economy of the
world. And no one can fully explain them. But one use they assuredly
had: they fixed the yoke of custom thoroughly on mankind. They were
the prime agents of the era. They put upon a fixed law a sanction so
fearful that no one could dream of not conforming to it. No one will
ever comprehend the arrested civilisations unless he sees the strict
dilemma of early society. Either men had no law at all, and lived in
confused tribes, hardly hanging together, or they had to obtain a
fixed law by processes of incredible difficulty. Those who
surmounted that difficulty soon destroyed all those that lay in
their way who did not. And then they a themselves were caught in
their own yoke. The customary discipline, which could only be
imposed on any early men by terrible sanctions, continued with those
sanctions, and killed out of the whole society the propensities to
variation which are the principle--of progress.
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