I think, important to realize that the
normal reason for consulting an oracle was not to ask questions of fact.
It was that some emergency had arisen in which men simply wanted to know
how they ought to behave. The advice they received in this way varied
from the virtuous to the abominable, as the religion itself varied. A
great mass of oracles can be quoted enjoining the rules of customary
morality, justice, honesty, piety, duty to a man's parents, to the old,
and to the weak. But of necessity the oracles hated change and strangled
the progress of knowledge. Also, like most manifestations of early
religion, they throve upon human terror: the more blind the terror the
stronger became their hold. In such an atmosphere the lowest and most
beastlike elements of humanity tended to come to the front; and religion
no doubt as a rule joined with them in drowning the voice of criticism
and of civilization, that is, of reason and of mercy. When really
frightened the oracle generally fell back on some remedy full of pain
and blood. The medieval plan of burning heretics alive had not yet been
invented. But the history of uncivilized man, if it were written, would
provide a vast list of victims, all of them innocent, who died or
suffered to expiate some portent or _monstrum_--some reported
+teras+--with which they had nothing whatever to do, which was in no way
altered by their suffering, which probably never really happened at all,
and if it did was of no consequence. The sins of the modern world in
dealing with heretics and witches have perhaps been more gigantic than
those of primitive men, but one can hardy rise from the record of these
ancient observances without being haunted by the judgement of the Roman
poet:

Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum,

and feeling with him that the lightening of this cloud, the taming of
this blind dragon, must rank among the very greatest services that
Hellenism wrought for mankind.

FOOTNOTES:

[6:1] Professor Emile Durkheim in his famous analysis of the religious
emotions argues that when a man feels the belief and the command as
something coming from without, superior, authoritative, of infinite
import, it is because religion is the work of the tribe and, as such,
superior to the individual. The voice of God is the imagined voice of
the whole tribe, heard or imagined by him who is going to break its
laws. I have some difficulty about the psychology implied in this
doctrine: sur