History of Religious Evolution 707 



steadily ripened through the year in warm chmates that de- 

 pendence on them became a passive and unstimulating accus- 

 tomment. But, in warm temperate or temperate regions, 

 where the wild olive or the oak gave food, fuel, wood for huts, 

 dye stuffs, and other products for man, or food support for 

 the animals on which he fed, a year of failure in their fruiting, 

 their decay by disease, their destruction by fire or by floods, 

 meant serious injury to man, and stimulated him to look with 

 reverential affection on them when he enjoyed their produce. 

 So various plants, and not least the oak and olive, became 

 widely invested with special regard. 



Again many animals, for a great variety of reasons, became 

 intimately and reverentially linked with high regard, by man. 

 It is often difficult or impossible as yet to tell why such ani- 

 mals as the crocodile, fish, the bear, the crow, and many others 

 became reverentially united in man's thoughts. But seasonal 

 migrations or activities, aspect and social qualities, the real 

 or imaginery habits they showed specially in relation to man, 

 were all doubtless determining factors, as they are still. When 

 these also were grouped in dreams with deceased relatives, 

 and with certain trees or their products already appreciated, 

 all assumed a connected value for, and were viewed with rev- 

 erential regard by, man that soon became what we can only 

 designate by the term worship^ For the expression that one 

 not unfrequently hears uttered by one person in regard to 

 another, "I just worship him," is at times extended to various 

 attractive or fascinating objects. If such be true for educated 

 persons now, even more would the principle find true observ- 

 ance with semi-brutish man. 



Therefore we would consider that succeeding to and ex- 

 panding from ancestralism came that wider and even deeper 

 religious sense of naturalism. This originated the tree wor- 

 ship of many tribes in the northern hemisphere, and tliat of 

 primitive Asiatic and African peoples. It doubtless orig- 

 inated also the animalistic worship of the ])rimitive Egyi)tians, 

 as well as of the Assyrians, Arabians, and other Semitic nations. 



During this phase of man's advancing religious evolution 

 we have the strongest reasons for believing that trees and 



