Page:An analysis of religious belief (1877).djvu/672

 we naturally pay more regard to our intercessors, show them more assiduous respect, feel towards them more gratitude, than we do to those with whom they intercede, and who stand too far above us to be approached directly by us. Keightley, in his "History of England," expresses himself as shocked by the far larger share of the offerings of the pious received at Canterbury by the altar of Thomas-á-Becket than was received by the altars of the Virgin and of the Son. The proportion is as follows:—In one year St. Thomas received £832, 12s. 3d.; the Virgin £63, 5s. 6d.; Christ only £3, 2s. 6d. Next year the martyr had £954, 6s. 3d.; Mary £4, 1s. 8d.; and Christ nothing at all. This relation is perfectly natural. Thomas-á-Becket was the local saint. He stood nearer to the people, was more intelligible to their minds, than the Virgin Mary; and the latter, again, was more intelligible to them than Jesus Christ, whose mystic attributes she did not share. This fact does but illustrate the common tendency of mankind to neglect the worship of the highest deity recognized in their formal creed, and to offer their prayers and their sacrifices to idols of lower pretensions and more human proportions.

That which, as the upshot of these speculations, we are chiefly concerned to note, is that religion everywhere contains, as its most essential ingredient, the conception of an unknown power; which power, thus offered by religion to the adoration of mankind, becomes the object of a double tendency: a tendency on the one hand to preserve it as a dim idea, represented to the mind under highly abstract forms; a tendency on the other hand, to bring it down to common comprehension by presenting it to the senses under concrete symbols. But under all images, however material; under all embodiments, however gross; the central thought of a power hidden behind sensible phenomena, unknown and unknowable, still remains.

So far then as historical inquiry throws light upon the answer to the second question in the previous chapter, that answer will be in the affirmative. It renders it at least highly probable that the common elements of religion are, from their universal or all but universal prevalence, "a necessary and therefore permanent portion of our mental furniture." Nor is this conclusion invalidated by the hypothetical objection that