446 HISTORY OF RELIGION 



will ever be so perfectly traced as to allow the same amount of 

 unerring prognostication as in astronomy. Hence the doubt whether 

 history is a science. But it must be recognized that, with the increase 

 of historical knowledge, the impression of a development according 

 to fixed laws has been steadily growing until at the present time few 

 careful observers would deny that the life' of man, in spite of his 

 finer and richer organization, hag been as really subject to law as 

 any other part of nature. Nor are serious students of history in- 

 clined to question the operation of these laws in the future any more 

 than their dominancy in the past, or to doubt that a knowledge of 

 the tendencies manifest in the historic development of the human 

 race will, in increasing measure, render it possible to predict, within 

 certain limits, whither the currents of thought and life will flow in 

 the future. The name of science is justified by the methodical effort 

 to gain certain and systematized knowledge and by the similarity 

 of the results to those obtained in all but the formal sciences. 



Historical theology may therefore without hesitancy be regarded as 

 that branch of the science of history which deals with the develop- 

 ment of man's religious life. Its scientific character is in no way 

 affected by any conclusions that may be reached as to the sanity of 

 religious emotions, the propriety of religious practices, the validity 

 of religious conceptions, and the objective reality of the power or 

 powers worshiped. Were religion nothing but a mass of emotions, 

 beliefs, and performances due to an immature or diseased mental 

 activity on the part of man, the rational attempt to trace its origin 

 and growth and to find the laws of its development would still be 

 a scientific work. 



In order to accomplish this work, it is of first importance to deter- 

 mine what phenomena of man's life should be assigned to the realm 

 of religion. The great number of definitions of religion that have been 

 proposed shows how difficult a task this is. The confusion in the 

 minds of some eminent scientists revealed by their statements as to 

 savage peoples possessing no religion indicates its necessity. It is 

 evident that in a definition there should be included every important 

 phase of man's religious life, emotional, intellectual, and practical, 

 and every important historic manifestation of religion, whether in 

 early ages known to us only through archaeological remains or in 

 later periods known through documentary evidence as well, among 

 uncivilized or civilized peoples. It is not permissible to regard 

 religion solely, or chiefly, as a feeling, or a belief, a more or less per- 

 fect interpretation of the universe, or a cult, or a rule of conduct, 

 inasmuch as all these elements are present in some form in all known 

 stages of religious development. The historian of religion has no 

 right to draw an artificial line of demarcation between the so-called 

 prehistoric age and the historic age, and to leave out of consideration 



