that old world, which is so like our modern world in so many things,
so much more like than many far more recent, or some that live
beside us, there is a part in which we seem to have no kindred,
which we stare at, of which we cannot think how it could be
credible, or how it came to be thought of. This is the archaic part
of that very world which we look at as so ancient; an 'antiquity'
which descended to them, hardly altered, perhaps, from times long
antecedent, which were as unintelligible to them as to us, or more
so. How this terrible religion--for such it was in all living
detail, though we make, and the ancients then made, an artistic use
of the more attractive bits of it--weighed on man, the great poem of
Lucretius, the most of a nineteenth-century poem of any in
antiquity, brings before us with a feeling so vivid as to be almost
a feeling of our own. 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