8 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babyloniathe pioneers of the civilisation we enjoy to-day, will be for us a
hopeless puzzle, a labyrinth without a clue.
Before that clue can be found, we must divest ourselves of our
modernism. We must go back in thought and sympathy to the old
Orient, and forget, so far as is possible, the intervening ages of
history and development, and the mental and moral differences
between the East and the West. I say so far as is possible, for the
possibility is relative only. No man can shake off the influences
of the age and country of which he is the child; we cannot undo
our training and education, or root out the inherited instincts with
which we were born. We cannot put back the hand of time, nor
[006] can the Ethiopian change his skin. All we can do is to suppress
our own prejudices, to rid ourselves of baseless assumptions
and prepossessions, and to interpret such evidence as we have
honestly and literally. Above all, we must possess that power of
sympathy, that historical imagination, as it is sometimes called,
which will enable us to realise the past, and to enter, in some
degree, into its feelings and experiences.
The first fact which the historian of religion has to bear in
mind is, that religion and morality are not necessarily connected
together. The recent history of religion in Western Europe, it is
true, has made it increasingly difficult for us to understand this
fact, especially in days when systems of morality have been put
forward as religions in themselves. But between religion and
morality there is not necessarily any close tie. Religion has to
do with a power outside ourselves, morality with our conduct
one to another. The civilised nations of the world have doubtless
usually regarded the power that governs the universe as a moral
power, and have consequently placed morality under the sanction
of religion. But the power may also be conceived of as non-
moral, or even as immoral; the blind law of destiny, to which,
according to Greek belief, the gods themselves were subject, was
necessarily non-moral; while certain Gnostic sects accounted
for the existence of evil by the theory that the creator-god was