ful illustrations
of the religion of enthusiasm. Euripides gives voice to
this spirit in the song of the Maenads in the _Bacchoe_:

"Will they ever come to me, ever again,
The long, long dances,
On through the dark till the dim stars wane?
Shall I feel the dew on my throat and the stream
Of wind in my hair? Shall our white feet gleam
In the dim expanses?
O feet of a fawn to the greenward fled,
Alone in the grass and the loveliness?"[1]

[Footnote 1: Euripides: _Bacchoe_ (Gilbert Murray translation).]

Every religion has its festival as well as its fast days. Sacrifices
come to be held less as offerings to jealous gods than as
sacrificial feasts, in which the worshipers themselves partake,
as opportunities for communal rejoicings and for friendly
fellowship with divinity. At sacrificial feasts it is as if the
gods themselves were at table.

Dance and song are a regular accompaniment of primitive
religion. Students of Greek drama, such as Jane Harrison
and Gilbert Murray, trace Greek tragedy back to the choruses
and dances of early Dionysiac festivals. Throughout the
history of religion not only have man's sorrow and need been
expressed, but also his sympathetic gladness with vitality,
fertility, and growth, his rejoicings over the fruitions and glad
eventualities of experience. Man has felt the decay and
evanescence of human goods. He has felt also the exuberance
of natural processes, the triumph of life over death when
a child is born, the renewal of life by food, the recurrence of
growth and fertility in the processes of the seasons, of sowing
and of harvest. And for all these enrichments and enlargements
of life, he has rejoiced, and found rituals to express his
rejoicings. He has had the impulse and the energy to sing
unto the Lord a new song.

THEOLOGY. Thus far we have discussed the religious experience
_as_ an experience, as normal, natural, and inevitable as
are love and hate, melancholy and exaltation, joy and sorrow.
Like these latter, the religious experience is subjected to
rationalization. Like all other emotions, that of religion
finds for itself a logic and a justification. But so profoundly
influential is "cosmic emotion" on men's lives that when it is
reasoned upon, the results are nothing less than an attitude
taken toward the whole of reality. Theology arises as a
world view formulated in accordance with a reasoned interpretation
of the religious experience. It