Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/563

Rh The religious interest is chiefly derivative. It contains, to be sure, an original factor in the craving for certain ecstatic experiences. Its prominence in the concern of mankind cannot, however, be laid to this craving. Like wealth and like government, religion has spread far beyond its first occasion, and insinuated itself into many channels of desire. The earliest non-religious force behind it is fear. Primos in orbe deos fecit timor. After man has by propitiation of the unseen powers assured his personal safety, he seeks to utilize them. He covenants with them that for regular prayer and sacrifice they shall grant increase and prosperity. The gods acquire economic importance. As they become more fully domesticated, they are approached with confidence, and worship is promoted by love and gratitude as well as by hope of benefits. With the advent of public worship religious feasts endear themselves as occasions for "orgiastic gladness" and "hilarious revelry." In the phallic cults they are prized as stimuli to sexual desire. Moreover, the common worship of the gods for public ends makes them props of order, bulwarks of family, property, and state. When the ethical sense becomes active, the gods come to be thought of as deliverers from temptation rather than from misfortune. One craves from them a clean heart rather than a fat harvest. Philosophy then blends with the theory of the gods and religion aspires to answer the Why, Whence, and Whither of the restless intellect. In the priestly cults religion becomes a stepping-stone to power, and so enlists ambition. Then the fear of a too-masterful church seizes upon men and they fervently embrace the more spiritual forms of faith as vessels of deliverance.

Thus religion has run the whole gamut of the passions. It has been the storm-center of feeling. Fear, greed, lust, sociability, gratitude, ambition, the instinct for liberty, the ethical impulses, and the intellectual yearnings have, at one time or another co-operated with the specific religious craving to magnify religion to the prodigious dimensions of a history-making force.

The religious interest cannot but wax and wane with the adequacy of religion to meet the various needs of men. The