nd by fear was it fostered. We see, furthermore, that man was not
created with religious feeling as a psychical trait, but that he
acquired it later on. We see, finally, that religious feeling is based,
primarily and fundamentally, on one of the chief laws of
nature--self-protection. The evolution and growth of Ethics demonstrate
this beyond peradventure.

It is not at all probable that man in the beginning, just after his
evolution from his ape-like ancestor, had, at first, any belief whatever
in supernatural agencies. In his struggle for existence, all of his
powers were directed toward the procurement of his food and the
preservation of life; the pithecoid man was only a degree higher than
the beasts in the scale of animal life. His psychic being, as yet,
remained, as it were, _in ovo_, and a long period of time must have
elapsed before he began to formulate and to recognize a system of
theogony. After years of experience, during which the laws of heredity
and progressive evolution played prominent parts, he took precedence
over other animals, and his struggle for existence became easier. He
then had time to study the wonderful and, to him, mysterious phenomena
of nature. His limited knowledge could not explain the various natural
operations by which he was surrounded, therefore he looked upon them as
being mysterious and supernatural. His psychical being became active and
inquiring, to satisfy which he created a system of gods which was
founded on natural phenomena. At first, the gods of primitive man were,
probably, few in number, and the chief god of all was the sun. Man early
recognized the sun's importance in the economy of nature; this beautiful
star, rising in the east in the morning, marching through the heavens
during the day, and sinking behind the western horizon in the evening,
must have been, to the awakening soul of man, a source of endless
conjecture and debate. What was more natural than his making the sun the
greatest god in his system of theogony? Man recognized in him the source
of all life, and, when he arrived at an age when he could use abstract
ideation in formulating his religion, he deified the life-giving
function as he noticed it in himself; he began to worship the generative
principle. Solar worship and its direct descendant, phallic worship, at
one time or another were the religions of almost every race on the face
of the globe. Solar worship, owing to its material quality, has long
since