Nyankupon of the Oji nation, it is remarked by Riis, 'The idea of him as a supreme spirit is obscure and uncertain, and often confounded with the visible heavens or sky, the upper world (sorro) which lies beyond human reach; and hence the same word is used also for heavens, sky, and even for rain and thunder.'[1] The same transition from the divine sky to its anthropomorphic deity shows out in the theology of the Tatar tribes. The rude Samoyed's mind scarcely if at all separates the visible personal Heaven from the divinity united with it under one and the same name, Num. Among the more cultured Finns, the cosmic attributes of the Heaven-god, Ukko the Old One, display the same original nature; he is the ancient of Heaven, the father of Heaven, the bearer of the Firmament, the god of the Air, the dweller on the Clouds, the Cloud-driver, the shepherd of the Cloud-lambs.[2] So far as the evidence of language, and document, and ceremony, can preserve the record of remotely ancient thought, China shows in the highest deity of the state religion a like theologic development. Tien, Heaven, is in personal shape the Shang-ti or Upper Emperor, the Lord of the Universe. The Chinese books may idealize this supreme divinity; they may say that his command is fate, that he rewards the good and punishes the wicked, that he loves and protects the people beneath him, that he manifests himself through events, that he is a spirit full of insight, penetrating, fearful, majestic. Yet they cannot refine him so utterly away into an abstract celestial deity, but that language and history still recognize him as what he was in the beginning, Tien, Heaven.[3]
- ↑ Waitz, 'Anthropologie,' vol. ii. p. 168, &c.; Burton, 'W. & W. fr. W. Afr.' p. 76.
- ↑ Castrén, 'Finn. Myth." p. 7, &c.
- ↑ Plath, 'Religion und Cultus der alten Chinesen,' part i. p. 18, &c.; part ii. p. 32; Doolittle, 'Chinese,' vol. ii. p. 396. See Max Müller, 'Lectures,' 2nd S. p. 437; Legge, 'Confucius,' p. 100. For further evidence as to savage and barbaric worship of the Heaven as Supreme Deity, see chap. xvii.
