how to deal mechanically with
material things, does belong wholly, is the workaday world, the region
of normal, commonplace, calculable happenings. With our telescopes
and microscopes we see farther and deeper into things than does the
savage. Yet the savage has excellent eyes. What he sees he sees.
Consequently, we must duly allow for the fact that there is for him,
as well as for us, a "natural," that is to say, normal and workaday
world; even though it be far narrower in extent than ours. The savage
is not perpetually spook-haunted. On the contrary, when he is engaged
on the daily round, and all is going well, he is as careless and happy
as a child.

But savage life has few safeguards. Crisis is a frequent, if
intermittent, element in it. Hunger, sickness and war are examples
of crisis. Birth and death are crises. Marriage is usually regarded
by humanity as a crisis. So is initiation--the turning-point in one's
career, when one steps out into the world of men. Now what, in terms
of mind, does crisis mean? It means that one is at one's wits' end;
that the ordinary and expected has been replaced by the extraordinary
and unexpected; that we are projected into the world of the unknown.
And in that world of the unknown we must miserably abide until, somehow,
confidence is restored.

Psychologically regarded, then, the function of religion is to restore
men's confidence when it is shaken by crisis. Men do not seek crisis;
they would always run away from it, if they could. Crisis seeks them;
and, whereas the feebler folk are ready to succumb, the bolder spirits
face it. Religion is the facing of the unknown. It is the courage in
it that brings comfort.[6]

[Footnote 6: The courage involved in all live religion normally
coexists with a certain modesty or humility. I have tried to work out
this point elsewhere in a short study entitled _The Birth of
Humility_.]

We must go on, however, to consider religion sociologically. A religion
is the effort to face crisis, so far as that effort is organized by
society in some particular way. A religion is congregational--that
is to say, serves the ends of a number of persons simultaneously. It
is traditional--that is to say, has served the ends of successive
generations of persons. Therefore inevitably it has standardized a
method. It involves a routine, a ritual. Also it involves some sort
of conventional doctrine, which is, as it were, the inner side of the
ritual--its lining.