what we see.” Anthropomorphism is, in fact, an ambiguous term. It may 
refer to limitation of God (as applied to the Greek mythology, which brings 
down the idea of divine beings to the level of human passion and senti- 
ment, and so Mr. Collins applies the term in some of his remarks) ; or it 
may refer to the expression in terms of hwman nature of a super-human 
Being whose nature is conceived of as analogous to the highest part of that 
nature of our own of which we are conscious. ‘To “ de-humanise” God (if I 
may be allowed the expression with reference to language concerning the 
Divine Being) into a bare abstract “absolute,” or abstract “infinite,” so far 
from being a high view of Deity, is a very dim and unsatisfactory one, and a 
view which exhibits the divorce of intellectual from moral conceptions. The 
primitive view, 7.¢., the personal view of God, is more true, and more 
complete, and therefore essentially more philosophical. All religions are 
based upon a sense of obligation felt towards a Personal Authority. This 
sense of dependence, which involves some sort of fear or reverence, is an 
essential and universal element of religion. Without it there could be no 
worship, no idea of priests or mediators, no sacrifice, no ascetic practices, no 
superstition, no idolatry. All these features of religions (and they are found 
wherever man has trod the earth) involve the idea of personality, i.c., the 
moral idea of Being, as distinguished from, yet connected with, the 
metaphysical idea of cause and the physical idea of force. The very 
personification which characterises ‘‘nature-worship” points beyond the 
phenomena in nature towards supra-mundane Brine, and therefore to will, 
intelligence, purpose, which in one aspect may be termed “ anthropo- 
morphic,” but in another view are naturally and necessarily regarded as 
“the Infinite” (Aditi), ‘the Boundless,” “the Incomprehensible” 
(Zimmensus). 
With this transcendent Being—swper-human, but not 7m-human—men 
connect their ideas of personal responsibility and obligation—their sense of 
guilt—their fear of judgment—their prayers for deliverance. 
What Max Miller has called Kathenotheism, in. speaking of the Vedic 
religion, “ the consciousness that all the deities are but different names of 
one and the same godhead,” is an evidence of an underlying monotheistic 
idea which, as it may in one direction lead on to a pantheistic philosophy, so 
also seems to point back to a traditional revelation, or primary idea of God. 
The spiritual basis of all early religions can be seen to be precedent to 
metaphysical theories, mythological stories, and polytheistic corruptions of 
worship. 
Mr. Collins thinks that ancestral worship is due to “a primitive belief in 
the immortality of the soul.” I hardly think that he is warranted in stating 
that men “ began their religion in the full blaze of what is now the brightest 
hope of the Christian”; but that primitive man had a belief in the 
continuity of perscnal existence seems, independently of Revelation, to be 
a correlative to his belief in God. The reflex of God’s eternal Being filled 
men’s souls with at least an aspiration after life eternal, and some hope of it. 
