ION OF RELIGIOUS BELIEFS

_To early man, the gods were real in the same sense that the
mountains, forests, or waterfalls which were thought to be their
homes were real. For a long time the spirits that lived in drugs or
wines and made them potent were believed to be of the same order of
fact as the potency itself. But the human creature is curious and
curiosity is bold. Hence, the discovery that a reported god may be a
myth._

MAX CARL OTTO.

The geologists estimate that the age of the earth is somewhere between
80 and 800 millions of years; that the Neanderthal race existed for more
than 200,000 years; that between 40,000 and 25,000 years ago, as the
Fourth Glacial Period softened towards more temperate conditions, a
different human type came upon the scene and exterminated Homo
Neanderthalensis. These first "true men" descended from some more
ape-like progenitors and are classed by ethnologists with the same
species as ourselves, and with all human races subsequent to them under
one common, specific term, Homo Sapiens.

The age of cultivation began with the neolithic phase of human affairs
about 10,000 or 12,000 years ago; about 6000 or 7000 years ago men began
to gather into the first towns and to develop something more than the
loose-knit tribes which had hitherto been their highest political
organization. Altogether, there must have elapsed about 500,000 years
from the earliest ape-like human stage of life on this planet to the
present time.

It necessarily follows that the age of our present civilization is by no
means that which the Bible stipulates, but is merely an atom in the vast
space-time of this earth. The reason for this disparity is that with the
development of the mind of man throughout the ages there was conceived
also his self-made religious systems, based on a subjective
interpretation of the universe, and not on an objective one, devoid of
emotional bias.

"Primitive man did not understand the natural cause of shadows, echoes,
the birth and death of vegetable and animal organisms. Of this ignorance
religion was born, and theology was evolved as its art of expression."
(_Draper._)

Our story takes us back some twelve thousand years to neolithic man.
Squatting in his rude hovel or gloomy cave, he listens to the sounds of
a storm without. The howling of the wind, the flashes of lightning, and
crashing of thunder give rise to that elemental emotion--fear. Fear