RELIGION AND PERSONALITY 419 



to do and to whom he is accountable, that the sense of obligation, so 

 important in shaping human life and conduct, is both forgotten 

 and kept alive. A sense of responsibility forever steadies man. He 

 has about him a constant observer, or observers, to whom he must 

 give account. The force of this statement is felt when one remembers 

 that, in the lower forms of religious development, no obligation was 

 felt which lay outside the realm presided over by the god or gods 

 to whom the worshiper owed allegiance. When every deity had his 

 own land, a crossing of the boundary line took one from the sphere 

 of obligation. Even in medieval times the heathen and the infidel 

 had no rights which the zealous, but misguided, Christian needed to 

 respect. It is only as God is recognized as one, and his kingdom as 

 ruling over all, that universal obligation is felt in the human breast. 

 Take this religious sense of obligation away from the world and the 

 earth is peopled with Ishmaelites and Philistines. 



Religion in bringing man en rapport with deity, ipso facto brings 

 about between himself and nature a relationship peculiarly true and 

 vital. In the last analysis it is man's religious nature which enables 

 him to interpret nature outside of himself in terms of his own life; 

 for underneath all phenomena he recognizes a common source with 

 his own. Such interpretations have at times been exceedingly crass. 

 The savage believes in the personeity of everything about him. In 

 the fetich is a spirit, of which the stick or stone is but the outward 

 representative; trees and mountains, the running brooks, and starry 

 heavens are peopled with unseen spirits not unlike his own. What 

 Tylor named animism, that is, the belief that everything is some- 

 body, is but the rude effort of the untutored mind at feeling after 

 the religious truth that behind all phenomena there is spirit, that all 

 move and have their being in God. 



It is in the religious consciousness that man first recognizes the 

 mysterious kinship between himself and nature. The North Ameri- 

 can Indian believing in his kinship with his tribal totem, and com- 

 muning with a kin-divinity through the sacrifice of a kindred animal, 

 is expressing in his crude way the same deep-seated truth set forth 

 by the Christian apostle to the Gentiles: " For the earnest expecta- 

 tion of the creature waiteth for the revealing of the sons of God; . . . 

 that the creation itself also shall be delivered from the bondage 

 of corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God." 

 Man and nature are discovered to be one in origin, and in a certain 

 sense one in end and destiny. So to the religious spirit all nature 

 speaks of God. " The heavens declare his glory and the firmament 

 sheweth his handy work." All things about us speak of the bowed 

 knee: 



" The clouds like hooded friars 

 Tell their beads in drops of rain." 



