r winning their favor. In primitive man this
sense of dependence was certainly bound up with a feeling of
fear.

It must be borne in mind that uncivilized peoples had
pathetically little understanding or control of the forces of
Nature. In consequence on being afflicted with some sudden
catastrophe of famine or disease, on experiencing a sudden
revelation in storm, wind, or volcanic eruption, of the terrible
magnificence of elemental forces, he must have been struck
with dread. He was living in a world that appeared to him
much less ordered and regular than ours appears to us. His
prayers and sacrifices were not always friendly and confidential
intercourse with the gods; they were as often ways of averting
the evils of malicious and terrifying demons. The enemies of
religion have been fond of pointing out how much of it has
been a quaking fear of the supernatural. It is in this spirit
that Lucretius's bitter attack is conceived.

When the life of man lay foul to see and grovelling upon the earth,
crushed by the weight of religion, which showed her face from the
realms of heaven, lowering upon mortals with dreadful mien, 't was
a man of Greece who dared first to raise his mortal eyes to meet her,
and first to stand forth to meet her; him neither the stories of the
gods nor thunderbolts checked, nor the sky with its revengeful roar,
but all the more spurred the eager daring of his mind to yearn to
be the first to burst through the close-set bolts upon the doors of
nature.[1]

[Footnote 1: Lucretius: _De Rerum Natura_, book I; lines 28-38.]

Primitive man feared the gods as much as he needed them.
Jane Harrison points out, for example, that as great a part of
Greek religion was given over to the exorcising of the evil and
jealous spirits of the underworld, as in friendly communion
with the beautiful and gracious Olympians.

But what appears in the ignorant and harassed savage as
fear may be transformed in civilized man into awe. Long
after man's crouching physical terror of the divine has passed
away, he may still live awed by the ultimate power that orders
the universe. He may, "at twilight, or in a mountain gorge,"
at a canon or waterfall, experience an involuntary thrill and
breathlessness, a deepened sense of the divinity which so
orders these things. He may have the same feeling at the
crises of life, at birth, disease, and death. He may sense on
occasion that overwhelming and infinite power of which Job
bec