Note 627 — Chapter VII
Reading edition
This connexion between ignorance and devotion is so clearly marked, that many nations have a separate god for the weather, to whom they say their prayers. In countries where men stop short of this, they ascribe the changes to witchcraft, or to some other supernatural power. See Mariner's Tonga Islands, vol. ii. pp. 7, 108; Tuckey's Expedit. to the Zaire, pp. 214, 215; Ellis's Hist. of Madagascar, vol. ii. p. 354; Asiatic Researches, vol. vi. pp. 193, 194, 297, vol. xvi. pp. 223, 342; Southey's Hist. of Brazil, vol. iii. p. 187; Davis's Chinese, vol. ii. p. 154; Beausobre, Hist. de Manichée, vol. ii. p. 394; Cudworth's Intellect. Syst. vol. ii. p. 539. The Hindus refer rain to supernatural causes in the Rig Veda, which is the oldest of their religious books; and they have held similar notions ever since. Rig Veda Sanhita, vol. i. pp. xxx. 10, 19, 26, 145, 175, 205, 224, 225, 265, 266, vol. ii. pp. 28, 41, 62, 110, 153, 158, 164, 166, 192, 199, 231, 258, 268, 293, 329; Journal of Asiatic Soc. vol. iii. p. 91; Coleman's Mythol. of the Hindus, p. 111; Ward's View of the Hindoos, vol. i. p. 38. See further two curious passages in the Dabistan, vol. i. p. 115, vol. ii. p. 337; and on the ‘Rain-makers,’ compare Catlin's North-American Indians, vol. i. pp. 134–140, with Buchanan's North-American Indians, pp. 258, 260: also a precisely similar class in Africa (Moffat's Southern Africa, pp. 305–325), and in Arabia (Niebuhr, Desc. de l'Arabie, pp. 237, 238).
Coming to a state of society nearer our own, we find that in the ninth century it was taken for granted in Christian countries that wind and hail were the work of wizards (Neander's Hist. of the Church, vol. vi. pp. 118, 139); that similar views passed on to the sixteenth century, and were sanctioned by Luther (Maury, Légendes Pieuses, pp. 18, 19); and finally, that when Swinburne was in Spain, only eighty years ago, he found the clergy on the point of putting an end to the opera, because they ‘attributed the want of rain to the influence of that ungodly entertainment.’ Swinburne's Travels through Spain in 1775 and 1776, vol. i. p. 177, 2nd edit. London, 1787.