g the nature and functions of the deity, the
nature of the soul and of conscience, and future life are all products
of scientific thought and might exist if religion did not exist, that
is, if men did not recognize any practical relations between themselves
and the deity. But, as a matter of fact, the religious sentiment,
coexisting with these ideas, has always entered into alliance with them,
creating nothing, but appropriating everything. Supernatural sanctions
and emotional coloring are products of general experience and feeling.
The intellectual and ethical content of religion varies with the
intellectual and ethical culture of its adherents; we may speak properly
of the philosophy and morals, not of a religion, but of the people who
profess it.

+16+. The internal history of religion is the history of individual
religious emotional experience (a phenomenon that hardly appears at all
in the records of early life), and becomes especially interesting only
in periods of advanced culture. It is true that this experience is
based on the whole reflective life of man, whose beginnings go back to
the earliest times. Aspirations and ideals, connected especially with
man's religious life, spring from the long line of experiences with
which men have always been struggling. The central fact of the higher
religious experience is communion and union with the deity, and the
roots of this conception are found in all the religious ideas and usages
that have been formulated and practiced in human history. The study of
such ideas and practices is thus important for the understanding of the
later more refined spiritual life, as in turn this latter throws light
on its crude predecessors. It is no disparagement to the higher forms of
thought that they have grown from feeble beginnings, and it does not
detract from the historical value of primitive life that we must decline
to credit it with depth and refinement. Every phase and every stadium of
human experience has its value, and the higher stages must be estimated
by what they are in themselves. In the history of religion the outward
and the inward elements have stood side by side in a unitary experience.
But, though the deeper feeling is necessarily more or less closely
connected with the external history, it is an independent fact requiring
a separate treatment, and will be only occasionally referred to in the
present volume.

CHAPTER II

THE SOUL

+17+. The doctrine of t