serious error, impairing the accuracy of the conception of religion, to
regard it as something apart from the rest of human life.

+1016+. The external history of religion, then, is the history of social
growth in the line of religious organization; that is, it has been
determined by religious outward needs in accordance with the growth of
ideas. In the consideration of this history we have to note a growth in
ritual, in devotional practices, and in the organization of religious
usages, first in tribal or national communities and then in religious
communities transcending national and racial boundaries.

EXTERNAL WORSHIP

+1017+. We assume a human society recognizing some supernatural or
extrahuman object or force that is regarded as powerful and as standing
in some sort of effective relation with human life. It is possible that
societies exist that do not recognize any such object or force or,
recognizing them, do not employ any means of entering into relation with
them. Such cases, if they exist (and their existence has not been fully
established), we may pass by with the remark that the absence of worship
need be taken to show only that ritual has been a slow growth.

Our information regarding the least-developed communities indicates that
with them religion, when it exists, is an affair of custom, of tradition
and usage, handed down during a period the history of which we have no
means of knowing. Worship as it first appears consists of ceremonies,
generally, perhaps always, regarded as having objective
effectiveness.[1831] The ritual act itself, in the earliest systems, is
powerful, in a sort magical, but tends to lose this character and take
on the forms of ordinary human intercourse.

+1018+. The precise ways in which extrahuman Powers were first
approached by men it is not possible now to determine--these procedures
lie far back in a dim prehistoric time. Coming down to our first
knowledge of religious man it may be assumed that the superhuman Powers
recognized by him were of varying sorts: a quasi-impersonal energy
which, however, must probably be ascribed ultimately to a personal
being; animals; ghosts; spirits resident in objects; anthropomorphic
beings. With all these it was necessary to establish relations, and
while the methods employed varied slightly according to the nature of
the object of worship, the fundamental cultic principle appears to have
been the same for all. Several different methods