ty in
the needs and desires of men, every land and each nation having
ideals all its own, we can yet discern, on a broad view of human
progress, an advance from lower to higher needs which is common to
the human race, and manifests itself in the history of each nation.
Three successive conditions of human life stand out before us as
markedly distinct, and as occurring wherever civilisation continues
to advance. The first is that in which material needs are
all-absorbing; the second that in which freedom from material needs
has been to some extent attained, and the highest aspirations are
directed to the safety and advancement of the nation in which men
find themselves united and secure; and the third is that in which the
individual realises his own value apart from the state, and develops
a personal ideal which is thenceforward his chief end. To these three
stages of human existence three types of religion correspond, and the
growth of religion consists in the main in its passage from the lower
to the higher of these stages.

The religion of the tribe belongs to that stage of man's existence in
which his energies are entirely occupied in the struggle against
nature and against other tribes. The conditions of his life do not
allow his higher faculties to grow, and while he is not without many
glimpses and anticipations of higher things, his religion, as a
whole, is a mass of childish fancies, and of fixed traditions which
he cannot explain, but does not venture to criticise or change. His
gods are petty and capricious beings, and his modes of influencing
them, though used with zeal and fervour, have little to do with
reason or with taste or with morality. It is in this kind of religion
that magic of all sorts is at home.

The advance from the religion of the tribe to that of the nation was
briefly described above (chapter vi.). The leading classes of the
state at least having gained some measure of security and leisure,
ideas of a nobler order spring up in their minds. The service of the
great gods of the state is organised with befitting dignity and
splendour; the best minds contribute to it all they can in the way of
art, of poetry, of purified legend, of stately ceremonial. Patriotism
and religion are one, the offices of worship are upheld by the whole
power of the state, and the gods speak with new authority to the
spirit of the worshipper. Now it is that great religious systems
arise, so powerful, so highly organ