processes of external nature; he may be viewed either as the inspirer of
the one or the creator and preserver of the other; and according as he
is mainly regarded from the one point of view or the other, the
conception of the divine nature tends to beget one of two very different
types of piety. To the man who traces the finger of God in the workings
of his own mind, the deity appears to be far closer than he seems to the
man who only infers the divine existence from the marvellous order,
harmony, and beauty of the external world; and we need not wonder that
the faith of the former is of a more fervent temper and supplies him
with more powerful incentives to a life of active devotion than the calm
and rational faith of the latter. We may conjecture that the piety of
most great religious reformers has belonged to the former rather than to
the latter type; in other words, that they have believed in God because
they felt, or imagined that they felt, him stirring in their own hearts
rather than because they discerned the handiwork of a divine artificer
in the wonderful mechanism of nature.

[Sidenote: Besides the two sorts of gods already distinguished, namely
natural gods and living human gods, there is a third sort which has
played an important part in history, namely, the spirits of deified dead
men. Euhemerism.]

Thus far I have distinguished two sorts of gods whom man discovers or
creates for himself by the exercise of his unaided faculties, to wit
natural gods, whom he infers from his observation of external nature,
and human gods or inspired men, whom he recognises by virtue of certain
extraordinary mental manifestations in himself or in others. But there
is another class of human gods which I have not yet mentioned and which
has played a very important part in the evolution of theology. I mean
the deified spirits of dead men. To judge by the accounts we possess not
only of savage and barbarous tribes but of some highly civilised
peoples, the worship of the human dead has been one of the commonest and
most influential forms of natural religion, perhaps indeed the commonest
and most influential of all. Obviously it rests on the supposition that
the human personality in some form, whether we call it a soul, a spirit,
a ghost, or what not, can survive death and thereafter continue for a
longer or shorter time to exercise great power for good or evil over the
destinies of the living, who are therefore compelled to propit