Page:What We Want.djvu/62

 developed in its general civilization, and that, therefore, the concept of God and the conception of the supernatural and natural worlds varied from age to age, from that of the Patriarchs to that of the Judges, to that of the Prophets, and so on. But it soon came also to be established, from the study of the historical value of the religious books of antiquity, that everything which does not come within the circle of moral and religious truths has a relative historical value only, and does not of itself form part of the object of Biblical teaching; and that all external representations of the self-revealing Divinity do not deserve any recognition as objective and real, since they are merely forms adequate to the effective representation of the Divine in such minds as are thirsting for supernatural manifestations.

This new conception, thus answering to the historico-psychological reality of the development of the human mind, by