giving force to certain principles of action, in part absolutely good and in part good relatively to the needs of the time, and again when it prompts the notion that now these principles might be so established on rational bases as to rule men effectually through their enlightened intellects.
These errors, however, which the anti-theological bias produces, are superficial compared with the error that remains. The antagonism to superstitious beliefs habitually leads to entire rejection of them. They are thrown aside with the assumption that, along with so much that is wrong, there is nothing right. Whereas the truth, recognizable only after antagonism has spent itself, is, that the wrong beliefs rejected are superficial, and that a right belief hidden by them remains when they have been rejected. Those who defend, equally with those who assail, religious creeds, suppose that every thing turns on the maintenance of the particular dogmas at issue; whereas the dogmas are but temporary forms of that which is permanent.
The process of Evolution which has progressively modified and advanced men's conceptions of the Universe, will continue to modify and advance them during the future. The ideas of Cause and Origin, which have been gradually changing, will change still further. But no changes in them, even when pushed to the extreme, will expel them from consciousness; and there can, therefore, never be an extinction of the correlative sentiments. No more in this than in other things will Evolution alter its general direction: it will continue along the same lines as hitherto. And, if we wish to see whither it tends, we have but to observe how there has been thus far a decreasing concreteness of the consciousness to which the religious sentiment is related, to infer that hereafter this concreteness will further diminish: leaving behind a substance of consciousness for which there is no adequate form, but which is none the less persistent and powerful.
Without seeming so, the development of religious sentiment has been continuous from the beginning; and its nature when a germ was the same as is its nature when fully developed. The savage first shows it in the feeling excited by some display of power in another exceeding his own power—some skill, some sagacity, in his chief, leading to a result he does not understand—something which has the element of mystery and arouses his wonder. To his unspeculative intellect there is nothing wonderful in the ordinary course of things around. The regular sequences, the constant relations, do not present themselves to him as problems needing interpretation. Only anomalies in that course of causation which he knows most intimately, namely, human will and power, excite his surprise and raise questions. And only when experiences of other classes of phenomena become multiplied enough for generalization, does the occurrence of anomalies among these also, arouse the same idea of mystery and the same sentiment of wonder:
