458 HISTORY OF RELIGION 



support, or suppress any form of religion. Religion becomes a strictly 

 private affair. Social institutions such as warfare, slavery, capitalism, 

 marriage and divorce, oath-taking, and others have exercised a very 

 marked influence, not only on religious views, but also on the ex- 

 pressions in practical life of the religious feeling. 



Significant as are the results which have been obtained by his- 

 torical theology, the methods of this science are not less so. A higher 

 degree of certainty concerning the facts of man's religious life in the 

 past, a clearer discernment of the laws governing its historical develop- 

 ment, and a surer forecast of the future depend upon the accuracy 

 and efficiency of the methods that are employed. 



These are the general methods of science applied to the history 

 of religion. In this field they may be distinguished as historico- 

 critical, comparative, and psychological. The historico-critical method 

 gathers, sifts, and describes the theological material in so far as it 

 reveals the growth of religion and the laws of its development. It 

 finds this material in the realms of philology, archaeology, literary 

 documents, oral tradition, and folk-lore, and subjects its evidential 

 value to searching scrutiny. On account of the excesses of some 

 students, the philological method has been much discredited, but 

 no amount of incidental error can invalidate the use of indications 

 in human speech, such as names of divinities and cult-objects, in 

 reconstructing the history of religion. For the earlier periods, we 

 have no other direct testimony of man's religious conceptions than 

 archaeological remains, such as tombs, altars, dolmens, menhirs, and 

 the like. In the study of literary documents, textual criticism is of 

 fundamental importance, as false conclusions have frequently been 

 drawn from texts that on closer examination have proved to be 

 corrupt. But investigations as to date and authorship are also 

 indispensable, since the value of testimony depends upon nearness 

 in time and space and competence in perceiving and describing 

 facts. In the case of uncivilized nations the evidence rests ultimately 

 on oral statements and, so far as their history is concerned, on oral 

 tradition. Much allowance must here be made for the medium 

 through which the testimony comes. The same necessity applies to 

 folk-lore. While there can be little doubt that it, to some extent, 

 represents the disintegration of earlier myths and legends, the in- 

 fluence of the civilization in which they have in this form survived 

 must be considered, and the production of new material resembling 

 the old, without having any genetic connection with it, must not be 

 overlooked. It is seldom that survivals of earlier religious conditions 

 reveal their nature as clearly in a new environment as ideas and 

 practices do where, for one cause or another, the religious develop- 

 ment has been arrested or retarded. 



The comparative method places side by side the different expres- 



