The advance of knowledge is an infinite progression towards a goal that ever recedes.
By religion, then, I understand a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life.
The awe and dread with which the untutored savage contemplates his mother-in-law are amongst the most familiar facts of anthropology.
The moral world is as little exempt as the physical world from the law of ceaseless change, of perpetual flux.
Even the recognition of an individual whom we see every day is only possible as the result of an abstract idea of him formed by generalization from his appearances in the past.
The consideration of human suffering is not one which enters into the calculations of primitive man.
The abundance, the solidity, and the splendor of the results already achieved by science are well fitted to inspire us with a cheerful confidence in the soundness of its method.
The temple of the sylvan goddess, indeed, has vanished, and the King of the Wood no longer stands sentinel over the Golden Bough.
Some of the old laws of Israel are clearly savage taboos of a familiar type thinly disguised as commands of the Deity.
This doctrine of transmigration or reincarnation of the soul is found among many tribes of savages.
The custom of burning a beneficent god is too foreign to later modes of thought to escape misinterpretation.
The Athenians regularly maintained a number of degraded and useless beings at the public expense; and when any calamity, such as plague, drought, or famine, befell the city, they sacrificed two of these outcast scapegoats.
For when a nation becomes civilized, if it does not drop human sacrifices altogether, it at least selects as victims only such wretches as would be put to death at any rate. Thus the killing of a god may sometimes come to be confounded with the execution of a criminal.
The scapegoat upon whom the sins of the people are periodically laid, may also be a human being.
If mankind had always been logical and wise, history would not be a long chronicle of folly and crime.
Yet perhaps no sacrifice is wholly useless which proves there are men who prefer honour to life.
Man has created gods in his own likeness and being himself mortal he has naturally supposed his creatures to be in the same sad predicament.
With the advance of knowledge, therefore, prayer and sacrifice assume the leading place in religious ritual; and magic; which once ranked with them as a legitimate equal, is gradually relegated to the background and sinks to the level of a black art.
Small minds cannot grasp great ideas; to their narrow comprehension, their purblind vision, nothing seems really great and important but themselves.
Indeed the influence of music on the development of religion is a subject which would repay a sympathetic study.