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view of religion is out of date.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.