gradually dispelled. On one point we may reasonably rest assured
that the knowledge of right and wrong and our sense of justice
and right-living have been developed quite independently of all
religious beliefs. The moral law embodied in the golden rule is
not an outgrowth of mysticism, or of man's notions of the
unknowable; but, on the contrary, is the result of experience,
and was formulated in response to a recognized law of human
necessity,--a law which involves the fundamental principle of
progress. The history of human development shows conclusively
that mankind GREW into the recognition of the moral law, that
through sympathy, or a desire for the welfare of others,--a
character which had its root in maternal affection,--conscience
and the moral sense were evolved.
While the moral law and the conscience may not be accounted as in
any sense the result of man's ideas concerning the unknowable,
neither can the errors and weaknesses developed in human nature
be regarded as the result of religion. Although the sexual
excesses which during three or four thousand years were practiced
as sacred rites, and treated as part and parcel of religion in
various parts of the world, have had the effect to stimulate and
strengthen the animal nature in man, yet these rites may not be
accounted as the primary cause of the supremacy of the lower
nature over the higher faculties. On the contrary, the impulse
which has been termed religion, with all the vagaries which its
history presents, is to be regarded more as an effect than as a
cause. The stage of a nation's development regulates its
religion. Man creates his own gods; they are powerless to change
him.
As written history records only those events in human experience
which belong to a comparatively recent period of man's existence,
and as the primitive conceptions of a Deity lie buried beneath
ages of corruption, glimpses of the earlier faiths of mankind, as
has already been stated, must be looked for in the traditions,
monuments, and languages of extinct races.
In reviewing this matter we shall doubtless observe the fact that
if the stage of a nation's growth is indicated by its religious
conceptions, and if remnants of religious beliefs are everywhere
present in the languages, traditions, and monuments of the past
through a careful study of these subjects we may expect to gain a
tolerably correct understanding not alone of the growth of the
