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Many of the efforts made by students of comparative religion to classify the various religions, seem to the writer defective through lack of the perception that social and religious evolution are vitally connected. From this point of view, the classification of religions as communal, individual, and communo-individual, would seem to be the best.
That is the point of view which is now gaining ground in all civilized lands both in theory and in practice. Such reasons are connected with communal welfare. "All immoral acts result in communal unhappiness, all moral acts in communal happiness," as Prof. A. Mathews remarks, "Science and Morality," Popular Science Monthly, March, 1909.
Moreover, for the outward task that he undertook he required internally, not only undisputed possession of all executive and legislative powers, not only perfect obedience from all legal authorities, but, again, the annihilation of all moral authority but his own, that is to say, the silence of public opinion and the isolation of each individual, and therefore the abolition, preventive and systematic, of any religious, ecclesiastic, pedagogic, charitable, literary, departmental, or communal initiative that might, now or in the future gather men against him or alongside of him.
The task to be performed was to transform the serfs at once, and with the least possible disturbance of the existing economic conditions, into a class of small Communal proprietors that is to say, a class of free peasants possessing a house and garden and a share of the Communal land.
To compass this end he brought into play all the means suggested by his exceptional position before the law and by his own peculiar social constitution. The Kahal, the autonomous rabbinical administration of communal affairs, more and more assumed the character of an inner dictatorship. Jewish society was persistently kept under the discipline of rigid principles.
Socially they are effective in binding the members of a community together a large sense of solidarity is produced by the communal recognition of kinship with the dead. Special stress is laid on this conception in China.
The two important coast towns Antium and Tarracina were, after the model of Ostia, occupied with Roman full-burgesses and restricted to a communal independence confined within narrow limits, while the previous burgesses were deprived in great part of their landed property in favour of the Roman colonists and, so far as they retained it, likewise adopted into the full burgess-union.
The "tax," as the meat tax was called for short, became in the course of time one of the scourges of Jewish communal life, that same life which the "measures" of the Government had merely succeeded in disorganizing.
It is true that as civilization has proceeded, this communal emotion has often seemed to fade away and leave us in the presence of the individual artist only.
The purpose of religion in the mind of the Indian is to gain the favorable, or to ward off evil, influences which the super-spirits are capable of bringing to the tribe or the individual. Goodness, unselfishness, truth-telling, respect for property, family, and filial duty, are cumulative by-products of communal living, closely connected with religious beliefs and conduct, but not their object.
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