IN LOWER MAN. 213 



we have obviously the fear of a superior power the power to 

 do evil, to produce death and havoc leading to efforts at the 

 conciliation of that power. 



In the human infant or child, even of the most highly 

 cultured man, there is no innate religious sense. It has, like 

 the moral sense, to be created and cultivated. 



Again, in certain forms of mental defect and disorder in 

 certain stages or kinds of idiocy, for example in the midst 

 of the highest civilisation, there is either no religious sense, 

 or only the faintest glimmerings can be developed as the 

 result of great pains in education. As was long ago pointed 

 out by Shakespeare, the idiot worships his toy, makes an idol 

 of manufactured wood or stone : 



The idiot takes his bauble for a god. 



The phenomena of human insanity in the lunatic asylums 

 of our large cities illustrate what may well be designated 

 the religion of fear or its fruits, the influence of fear as an 

 element in religion. Fear is an influence that may be said 

 to pervade, or to form the basis of, many kinds or forms of 

 religion or worship, superstition and its rites, not in savage 

 races only, but also among civilised and semi-civilised peoples 

 fear, that is, of a power to do evil. But the acme of this 

 fear is to be found in certain forms of what is called religious 

 insanity. As a physician whose specialty is the treatment of 

 insanity and allied disorders I have to encounter every day 

 cases of poor nervous, timid, hysterical weaklings of both sexes, 

 but especially young ladies, young women, or girls, whose 

 life is rendered intolerable by religious delusions. A more 

 pitiable class of patients I am not acquainted with ; more 

 abject wretchedness I cannot conceive. Their extreme mental 

 misery very commonly impels them to suicide. 

 Anywhere anywhere out of the world 



is their constant cry and aspiration. And for what reason ? 

 Because they have constantly in their mind's eye what they 

 believe to be the terrible realities of a physical hell. Ever- 

 lasting fire and brimstone, a lake of fire worse than the crater 

 of Kilauea or any of this world's active volcanoes, the worm 

 that dieth not, have inspired a dread compared with which 



