454 HISTORY OF RELIGION 



advanced. A more definite date cannot at present be assigned by 

 history to the origin of religion. . 



A third fundamental conception of historical theology is that all 

 religion is subject to the same laws of development. It can find no excep- 

 tions. Whether the manifestations of the religious consciousness 

 are of a high or a low order, they appear in their necessary causal 

 connection with what precedes and what follows, in their proper 

 place in the course of development determined by the operation of 

 laws that are based on the constitution of the human mind and of 

 the universe. These tendencies are discernible in the lowest stages 

 of man's life known to us as well as in all subsequent stages. Hence 

 the impossibility of indicating an absolute starting-point for the 

 religious development, either in a particular idea or practice, or in 

 a particular period. 



The attempt to demonstrate that religion began with animism, 

 or ancestral worship, or totemism, or worship of the celestial phe- 

 nomena, or with the attention paid to any particular group of 

 objects, has not been successful. It is indeed obvious that an in- 

 tense occupation with the terrestrial powers constantly affecting 

 man's life preceded an equally keen interest in the luminaries in the 

 sky which are more remote and apparently have less concern about 

 man. But the majestic object striding across the heaven in the light 

 of the day, as well as the beings peopling the sky in the darkness of 

 the night, and their struggles with clouds and other hostile powers, 

 must have attracted man's attention long b.efore the practical ne- 

 cessities of his developing social life made him aware of his depend- 

 ence upon them. The analogies furnished by the infancy of the 

 individual and the ideas of savages suggest that the religious con- 

 sciousness of primitive man included a great variety of elements in 

 rudimentary form, of which some found a fuller development in one 

 race or physical environment, some in another. 



This fundamental conception of a development according to law 

 also implies that no historic phase of religion can have the character 

 of finality. The claim to finality has been freely made, especially 

 where the religious consciousness has, as it were, crystallized itself in 

 laws, sacred writings, and creedal statements. These seem to say, 

 "Thus far thou shalt go, and no farther!" The Vedas or the Tripi- 

 taka, the Avesta or the Torah, the New Testament or the Qur'an 

 appear to fix the limits beyond which there is no further religious 

 truth to discover and no higher religious life is possible. The ven- 

 eration for a founder has a special tendency to foster the conviction 

 that all religious truth must have been seen by him and that the 

 religious development of his followers is but the unfolding of his 

 thought. Historical theology has shown the fallacy of any such 

 assumption. Christianity, for instance, has only one of its roots in 



