iermacher
urged was one of essential importance to the matter. Belief in gods
and acts of worship paid to them do not constitute religion unless
the sentiment, the sense of need, be also there. These three
together, feeling, belief, and will expressing itself in action,
constitute religion both in the lowest and in the highest levels of
civilisation.

A belief must exist, to take a step farther, that the being
worshipped is capable of supplying what the worshipper requires. Men
do not pray nor bring offerings to beings they suppose to be
incapable of attending to them, or powerless to do them any good or
evil. It is implied in every act of worship that the being addressed
is a power who is able to do for the worshipper what he cannot do for
himself. It is his inability to help himself or to supply his own
needs that sends the worshipper to his god, who has a power he
himself has not. If he could help himself he would not need religion,
if his life were either perfectly prosperous and even, so that there
was nothing left to wish for, or perfectly miserable and
unsuccessful, so that there was no room for hope, he would not resort
to higher powers; but neither of these two being the case, his life
on the contrary being a mixed lot of good and evil, in which there
are blessings his own forces cannot secure, and dangers from which no
efforts of his own can save him, and the belief having arisen within
him, in what way we need not now inquire, that higher powers exist
who can, if they will, defend and prosper him, in this way he has
religion, he keeps up intercourse with higher powers. And thus
religion is not necessarily, even in its most primitive form, a
manifestation of mere selfishness. Though gifts are offered which are
expected to please the higher beings, and though benefits are asked
of which the worshipper is urgently in need, such transactions are
not necessarily sordid any more than similar applications between
human beings, between two friends, or between a parent and a child.
Even the savage living in entire isolation, at war with every one and
conscious of no needs but those of food and shelter, will not seek
benefits from his god without some feeling of attachment, nor without
some sense of strengthened friendship should the benefit be granted
him. When once this sense of friendship has arisen, religion is
present, the man has come to be in living relation with a higher
power, whom he conceives, no doubt, af