divine honors to images made of wood or stone, or to any other material object. What the so-called idolator actually worships is the spirit that the image is supposed to represent. If he believes the spirit has gone out of the object or image, he treats it with undisguised contempt.

That there is no real difference between idolatry and fetishism is well illustrated by the way the Chinese often treat the images of their gods. As described by an eye-witness, if after long praying they do not get what they wish, they call the god all the hard names they can think of, and cry out, "How now, dog of a spirit! we give you a lodging in a magnificent temple, we gild you handsomely, feed you well, and offer incense to you; yet after all this care, you are so ungrateful as to refuse us what we ask of you." Then they pull the image down from its pedestal, tie cords around it, and drag it through the mud and offal of the streets to punish the god for the expense of the perfumery they have wasted upon him.

Every image-maker the world over does his best to embody the ideas of the person for whom the image is made. He knows well enough that unless he does this, he will receive no compensation for his labor. When Brahma is represented with dozens of hands, Diana with a hundred breasts, and other greater or less deities with impossible features and accessories, it is simply an attempt to express the superhuman qualities of these beings, not to caricature their powers.

If these steps in the evolution are approximately true to fact, we see how weak and erroneous the position is that makes religion the invention of priests and politicians for the purpose of terrorizing the people into submission to their authority, and securing the contin

uance of their power. This opinion was strongly advocated by certain English writers of the eighteenth century, and had many followers; among them the poet Shelley was one of the most prominent. It widely prevailed in France at the time of the Revolution, and was one of the chief causes of its horrors. Besides being based on a false and superficial idea of what religion is, it ignores the fact that religion is older than any form of priesthood. The priest is, in point of fact, a conservator, and not an innovator. He chiefly concerns himself with perpetuating what already is. His hold upon the community is primarily due to the influence religion has over men, not to his ability to manipulate that religion. He may, of course, unduly increase his influence, and turn religion into wrong channels for personal ends, but the extent to which he has done so is grossly exaggerated in many quarters. For such a claim cannot be borne out by a careful study of the historical facts.

In the light of this view of the evolution of religion, we can see how irrational it is to divide religions into true and false, instead of classifying them as primitive and developed. It was maintained by Empedocles among the ancient Greeks that all religions are false because they are the product of a diseased mind, and Feuerbach in the last century strongly advocated the same view among the Germans.

While few, if any, maintain that opinion at present, there are many who hold that all religions are false except one, and that the one they themselves have come to adopt. The Jew does this who asserts that God by a perpetual covenant, recorded in the Old Testament, has made his own race the sole repository of his will. The Islamite does this who regards the

Koran alone as the sole guide to truth and life. And the Christian who sees in the New Testament the only source of religious faith and practice belongs to the same class. No writer has given us a more vivid picture of the erroneous way of regarding the religions of the world than Milton in his Paradise Lost. That all religions except the Christian are pure inventions of the Devil to ensnare the unwary is his fundamental thought.

This position has been the source of untold mischief and suffering in the past, and immensely impedes the progress of mankind at present. It is contrary to actual fact, and is based upon the false assumption that man possesses the ability to acquire absolute certainty in religious matters, a thing which is denied to him in every other sphere.

The truth is that man's religion develops as he himself develops. The steps in the evolution of religion are the steps in his own mental advancement. There is never a time after he comes into conscious possession of his powers as a person when he is without religion, and there is no possibility of his outgrowing religion. He does not get his religion out of any book, but primarily out of the experiences of his own mind and heart. The experiences of others are a help to him only as he reproduces them in his own. The more sen

sual he is, the more sensual will be his religion, and the more rational and pure his life is, the more refined and spiritual will his religion become. In other words, the more of a man he is himself, the loftier will his conception be of the Maker and Sustainer of all truth and life.

The reason for this is that every man is so constructed that he must make his god in his own image.

Religion arises in the ability of man to form an ideal of things that transcend the real. A man without imagination would be without religion, for he would be no longer a man, but would have sunk down to the level of the brute. No man ever worshipped an abstraction. He pays homage only to some concrete thing, and his ability to form a picture of a Power higher than himself depends upon his imagination, which simply takes the highest in his own experience and attributes it to his god. This has been true of man in all stages of his history, is true now, and we cannot think of a time when it will be otherwise.

The charge that religion is anthropomorphic is admitted without hesitation. For this is true of everything beyond the merely physical, of which we have any knowledge. We cannot think of any being above ourselves, unless we assume that being to be in some respects at least in our own image. It is psychologically impossible not to do so, if we make the attempt at all. Every man must worship his own thought of God, and his progress in civilization is best measured by the worthiness of that thought. The religious nature of man, when once aroused, can never be lulled to rest. It must feed upon something. For it is the most fundamental and pervasive of all man's powers. It is perpetually yearning for expression, and can only for a time be partially smothered. It will reach its full and complete fruition in every one of us only when we come to realize in our own experience the most commonplace and yet truest saying of all the ages upon this subject, that the highest of all existences in this universe is "not far from every one of us; for in him we live and move and have our being."

CHAPTER III.

SACRED BOOKS AND HOW THEY ORIGINATE.

a. The Sacred Tablets of the Babylonians.In treating of the subject of the relation of bibles to religion we need, first of all, to note the fact that three things existed in this world long before there were any bibles, namely, nature, man, and God.

The "little speck of matter" in our stellar universe which we call the earth had passed through innumerable changes in form and condition ages before man appeared upon its surface, and man had established elaborate systems of religious worship on many portions of our planet centuries before a bible of any description had even been thought of. For the moment a human being begins to attain a consciousness of his own existence and the existence of a world around and above him, he forms at once some sort of religion, and there is never a time in his history as a man when he is without religion.

Hence a very little reflection will lead us to see that a bible cannot be brought into existence until man has had some experience with nature and has learned to look with some degree of clearness through nature up to superhuman powers. No bible can create this experience. All it can do is to record what has been experienced in the past and anticipate with more or less assurance what may come within the realm of