Page:An analysis of religious belief (1877).djvu/36

 causes. Among very rude nations, the commonest and apparently most unimpressive objects will serve as fetishes, or incarnations of the mysterious force. Pieces of wood, stones, ornaments worn on the person, or almost anything, may under some circumstances do duty in this capacity. It is a further stage of progress when the more conspicuous objects of nature, lofty mountains, rivers, trees, fountains, and so forth, are deified, to the exclusion of more insignificant things. Still higher is the adoration of bodies which do not belong to this earth at all, and whose nature is, therefore, more mysterious—the sun, the moon, the planets or the stars, the clouds and tempests, the winds, and similar imposing phenomena. And this stage passes naturally into one where the gods, at first merely forces of nature personified, lose their character of forces, and become exclusively persons. They are then conceived as beings in human form, but endowed with much more than human faculties. Actual persons, especially the ancestors of the living generation, are also the frequent recipients of religious adoration. By other races, or by the same races at a later period, the numerous gods of polytheism are merged in one supreme god, to whom the others are subordinated as agents of his will, or before whose grandeur they disappear altogether; while this worship of powers conceived as beneficent is very frequently accompanied, more or less avowedly, by a parallel worship of powers conceived as malevolent, and whom, by reason of that very malevolence, it is occasionally deemed the more needful to conciliate.

The second element—the conviction that these deities are accessible to human requests—is shown both by the fact of worship being offered and by the mode in which it is conducted. In the first place, it is plain that prayer would not be offered at all but for the belief that it exercises some influence on the beings prayed to. But the theory does not require that they should be equally amenable to it at all times, from all persons, or in whatever way it is uttered. On the contrary, accessibility to prayer implies in these who receive it an inclination to listen with attention to the language in which they are addressed, and to be more or less moved by it according to its nature.

Reasoning from the authorities of earth whom he knows, to