not have been fit for the possession of it; it was given
prematurely. No. The history of early civilisation is the history of
a struggle in which man has everything to conquer, and in which he is
not remembering something he had lost, but advancing by new routes to
a land he never reached before. And if civilisation was won for the
first time, so was religion.

We may also put aside the theory that man had religion from the first
as an innate idea, that he found information all ready and prepared
in his mind of what it was proper to do in this direction, and how it
was to be done. There was indeed a suggestion from within; but it was
due not to any special faculty lying outside the essential structure
of human nature, but to the constitution of the human mind itself. We
cannot go into the philosophical question of the basis of religion in
the human mind.[2] It would seem to be a psychological necessity. At
all stages of his existence the world of which man is aware outside
him, and the world of feelings and desires within him are in
conflict. But the conviction lives within him that in some way they
can be brought into harmony, and that a power exists which rules in
both of these discordant realms and in which, if he can identify
himself with it, he also will escape from their discord. If this be
so, then this necessity to seek after a higher power must have begun
to operate as soon as human consciousness appeared. The savage
certainly was never unacquainted with the discrepancy between what he
wanted and what the world would give him, between the inner man so
full of desires and plans, and that outward nature which denied him
his desires and thwarted his plans, and before which he felt so
feeble and insecure. He also could not but be driven, if his life was
to go on at all on any tolerable basis, to believe in something that
had to do both with the world outside him and with the world of his
heart, in a being which both had sympathy with his desires and power
to give effect to them outwardly.

[Footnote 2: See on this subject Prof. Edward Caird's Gifford
Lectures, _The Evolution of Religion_, 1893. Galloway, _The
Principles of Religious Development_.]

The whole of the early world did entertain such a belief. This is the
first and the most important instance of uniformity of thought at a
stage through which every nation once passed; all men at that stage
believe in gods. We will not refuse the name of religion to th