ter such
an example of the fragmentary nature of the evidence it is in
comparison easy to believe that hundreds of strange institutions may
have passed away and have left behind them not only no memorial, but
not even a trace or a vestige to help the imagination to figure what
they were.

I cannot expand the subject, but in the same way the better religions
have had a great physical advantage, if I may say so, over the worse.
They have given what I may call a CONFIDENCE IN THE UNIVERSE. The
savage subjected to a mean superstition, is afraid to walk simply about
the world--he cannot do THIS because it is ominous, or he must do THAT
because it is lucky, or he cannot do anything at all till the gods have
spoken and given him leave to begin. But under the higher religions
there is no similar slavery and no similar terror.

The belief of the Greek

_eis oianos aristos amunesthai peri patres;_

the belief of the Roman that he was to trust in the gods of Borne, for
those gods are stronger than all others; the belief of Cromwell's
soldiery that they were 'to trust in God and keep their powder dry,'
are great steps in upward progress, using progress in its narrowest
sense. They all enabled those who believed them 'to take the world as
it comes,' to be guided by no unreal reason, and to be limited by no
mystic scruple; whenever they found anything to do, to do it with their
might. And more directly what I may call the fortifying religions, that
is to say, those which lay the plainest stress on the manly parts of
morality--upon valour, on truth and industry--have had plainly the most
obvious effect in strengthening the races which believed them, and in
making those races the winning races.

No doubt many sorts of primitive improvement are pernicious to war; an
exquisite sense of beauty, a love of meditation, a tendency to
cultivate the force of the mind at the expense of the force of the
body, for example, help in their respective degrees to make men less
warlike than they would otherwise be. But these are the virtues of
other ages. The first work of the first ages is to bind men together in
the strong bond of a rough, coarse, harsh custom; and the incessant
conflict of nations effects this in the best way. Every nation, is an
'hereditary co-operative group,' bound by a fixed custom; and out of
those groups those conquer which have the most binding and most
invigorating customs, and these are, as a rough rule, the best cus