Page:An analysis of religious belief (1877).djvu/651

 article of their theology, there is nothing beyond theology in which they agree; then religion is a mere superficial product of circumstances, having no more solid guarantee than the authority of the particular teachers of each special variety. There is in fact no religion; there are only religions. There is no universal Faith; there is only particular Belief.

These, then, are the queries to which our attention must be addressed:—

1. Are there in the several religions of mankind any common elements?

2. If so, are those common elements a necessary, and therefore permanent, portion of our mental furniture?

3. If so, are those elements the correlatives of any actual truths, or not?

It may have been observed that all the phenomena we have examined in the previous Book imply one assumption, and cannot be understood without that assumption. All of them imply some kind of power or powers either behind, beyond, or external to the material world and the human beings who inhabit it, or at least involved in and manifested through that world and its inhabitants; some power whose nature is not clear to us, but whose effects are perceptible to our senses; some power to which we ourselves and the material world are equally subject. Sometimes indeed the power which religion thus assumes is broken up into several minor forces, and instead of a single deity we have several deities controlling the operations of nature. But, without dwelling now upon the fact that polytheistic creeds often look above the lesser beings whom they commonly put forward to a more mysterious and greater God, it may be observed that these minor forces are no more than forms of the one great force from which they are parted off by an imaginative subdivision. To place the ocean under one divinity, the winds under another, and the sun under a third, is practically a mental process of the same kind as to place them all under a single divinity; and the existence of some such cause of material phenomena being granted, it is a mere question of less or greater representative capacity whether we range them under numerous chiefs or comprehend them all under one. In either case we assume extra-mundane and super