The Religions of Mankind

the rise of religion in his soul. This has been severely criticized by many writers, but, after all, it is one way of stating that in man there is that which answers to the voice from without and which in the end results in religion. It points to that mysterious something which makes man reach out beyond the seen to the invisible world of which he is dimly conscious. But when one believes that God has been revealing himself to man in many forms and at all periods in the long story of his life it is possible to take one further step. We are told that there is a light which lighteth every man coming into the world, and that even far removed from any of the legal systems which have been devised there is an inner law in the breasts of men which acts as a monitor over their thoughts and deeds. We may not believe in a primitive revelation in the sense that it consisted of a number of religious ideas placed in the mind of primitive man, but it is a very different matter to believe that man's religious nature, his religious proclivity, is the gift of God, a part of his original endowment, without which, whatever nature or society might have done, religion would never have developed. The Development Of Religion Two results of our study are doubtless already apparent. £ne is that religion is fundamentally the same thing, whether found among wild men on an island in the South Seas or among the cultivated members of a Christian church. $t is always a relationship between m... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.