Rensselaer Republican, Volume 16, Number 17, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 January 1884 — Religion and Environments. [ARTICLE]

Religion and Environments.

Thus do the peculiarities of natural objects supply moulds in which the metal of religious faith, already lying latent, readily sets. And not only directly, but indirectly, do they shape the forms of faith. The rushing river, e. g., not merely attracts the reverence of the primitive man to itself, but by its swift and treacherous motion, its sinuous course, snake-like hiss* and gleam, it is personified as a mighty divine serpent, and next makes sacred by association the serpents of the country about. The sky, personified by the ancient Egyptian as a heavenly goose, enveloping and hatching the cosmic egg, made sacred henceforth all to the pious dwellers by the Nile. In* climes like Egypt, where the skies are rainless and the whole aspect of nature equable, almost unchanging, there the gods are marked by calmness of bearing andserenity of nature. We must go to the slopes of the Himalayas or the ridges of the Appennines to find the howling Rudra, with his attending Maruta, the pounders, rushing wildly through the glens, or to see the bullocks slain in honor of Jupiter Tonans, the Thunderer. In cold and temperate climes it is the enlivening and warming pun that is loved and adored; but, in the sultry air of the tropics, the sun and the sky of day become evil and destructive deities, and affection is transferred to the refreshing sky of pight. a So, also, in their ideas of heaven and Jiell, there is a natural contrast between the faitji of the man in the tropics and the man of the Arctic zone. To the first, the future home of the good is some abode of coolness, some garden of the Hesperides, or a breezy Olympian height, and the place of punishment is a place of fire. To the Icelander, hell is the place of cold, worse far to him than fire, and heaven some comfortable hall surrounded by a hedge of flame. Again, in hot climes, where the soil of the river bottoms is deep and rich, and nature teems with % productiveness, there the gods are credited with the same sensuous nature; religious ideas are apt to revolve about the mysteries of procreation, and the worship of the people is apt to include not a few impure rites and symbols.— Prof. Bixby, in Popular Science.