176 THE SCIENCE OF RELIGION. 



makes the Oriental delight in prostrating himself before 

 the throne ; that the noble . enthusiasm which inspires 

 men to devote themselves to the service of their god, 

 and to suffer death rather than deny his name, is 

 identical with the devotion of the faithful subject who, 

 to serve his royal master, gives up his fortune or his 

 life without the faintest prospect of reward. The 

 religious sentiment, about which so much has been 

 said, has nothing distinctive in itself. Love and fear, 

 self-denial and devotion, existed before those phantoms 

 were created which men call gods ; and men have 

 merely applied to invisible kings the sentiments 

 which they had previously felt towards their earthly 

 kings. If they are a people in a savage state, they 

 hate both kings and gods within their hearts, and obey 

 them only out of fear. If they are a people in a higher 

 state, love is mingled with their fear, producing an affec- 

 tionate awe which, in itself, is pleasing to the mind. 

 That the worship of the unseen king should survive the 

 worship of the earthly king is natural enough ; but 

 even that will not endure for ever ; the time is coming 

 when the crowned idea will be cast aside and the 

 despotic shadow disappear. 



By thus translating, or by retranslating, god into 

 king, piety into loyalty, and so on : by bearing in 

 mind that the gods were not abstract ideas to our 

 ancestors as they are to us, but bond-fide men, differ- 

 ing only from men on earth in their invisibility and 

 other magic powers ; by noting that the moral disposi- 

 tion of a god is an image of the moral sense of those 

 who worship him — their beau-ideal of what a king 

 should be ; that the number and arrangement of the 

 gods depend exclusively on the intellectual faculties of 

 the people concerned, on their knowledge of nature, 



