14 RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 



of such theories make their appearance; the implication is 

 practically the same. Grant that among all races who have 

 passed a certain stage of intellectual development there are 

 found vague notions concerning the origin and hidden na- 

 ture of surrounding things; and there arises the inference 

 that such notions are necessary products of progressing 

 intelligence. Their endless variety serves but to strengthen 

 this conclusion: showing as it does a more or less inde- 

 pendent genesis — showing how, in different places and 

 times, like conditions have led to similar trains of thought, 

 ending in analogous results. That these countless different, 

 and yet allied, phenomena presented by all religions are 

 accidental or factitious, is an untenable supposition. A 

 candid examination of the evidence quite negatives the doc- 

 trine maintained by some, that creeds are priestly inven- 

 tions. Even as a mere question of probabilities it cannot 

 rationally be concluded that in every society, past and pres- 

 ent, savage and civilized, certain members of the commu- 

 nity have combined to delude the rest, in ways so analogous. 

 To any who may allege that some primitive fiction was de- 

 vised by some primitive priesthood, before yet mankind had 

 diverged from a common centre, a reply is furnished by 

 philology; for philology proves the dispersion of mankind 

 to have commenced before there existed a language suffi- 

 ciently organized to express religious ideas. Moreover, 

 were it otherwise tenable, the hypothesis of artificial origin 

 fails to account for the facts,. It does not explain why, 

 under all changes of form, certain elements of religious be- 

 lief remain constant. It does not show us how it happens 

 that while adverse criticism has from age to age gone on 

 destroying particular theological dogmas, it has not de- 

 stroyed the fundamental conception underlying these dog- 

 mas. It leaves us without any solution of the striking 

 circumstance that when, from the absurdities and corrup- 

 tions accumulated around them, national creeds have fallen 

 into general discredit, ending in indifferentisni or positive 



