RELIGIOUS RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT. 831 



unlimited vision and universal knowledge. The emotional 

 nature simultaneously undergoes a parallel transformation. 

 The grosser passions, originally conspicuous and carefully 

 ministered to by devotees, gradually fade, leaving only the 

 passions less related to corporeal satisfactions ; and eventually 

 these, too, become partially de-humanized. 



Ascribed characters of deities are continually adapted 

 und re-adapted to the needs of the social state. During the 

 militant phase of activity, the chief god is conceived as 

 holding insubordination the greatest crime, as implacable 

 in anger, as merciless in punishment ; and any alleged attri 

 butes of milder kinds occupy but small space in the social 

 consciousness. But where militancy declines and the harsh 

 despotic form of government appropriate to it is gradually 

 qualified by the form appropriate to industrialism, the fore 

 ground of the religious consciousness is increasingly filled 

 with those ascribed traits of the divine nature which are con 

 gruous with the ethics of peace : divine love, divine forgive 

 ness, divine mercy, are now the characteristics enlarged 

 upon. 



To perceive clearly the effects of mental progress and 

 changing social life, thus stated in the abstract, we must 

 glance at them in the concrete. If, without foregone conclu 

 sions, we contemplate the traditions, records, and monuments, 

 of the Egyptians, we see that out of their primitive ideas of 

 gods, brute or human, there were evolved spiritualized ideas 

 of gods, and finally of a god ; until the priesthoods of later 

 times, repudiating the earlier ideas, described them as corrup 

 tions : being swayed by the universal tendency to regard the 

 first state as the highest a tendency traceable down to the 

 theories of existing theologians and mythologists. Again, if, 

 putting aside speculations, and not asking what historical 

 value the Iliad may have, we take it simply as indicating the 

 early Greek notion of Zeus, and compare this with the notion 

 contained in the Platonic dialogues; we see that Greek civili 

 zation had greatly modified (in the better minds, at least) the 



