is inevitable. Man adopts toward them
the attitude that he takes toward his own rulers. To pray to the gods
is as natural as to pray to those who have power and who, we hope, may
be moved by our prayers. Psychologically, there is no difference in
the attitude involved. Providence is merely the action of an agent who
is more than human. For primitive man it did not imply an intervention
with nature, for the very good reason that the gods were active in
nature. Nature was the sphere of the activities of the gods in the
same way that it was, in a minor degree, the sphere of the activity of
men. We must rid ourselves of the modern conception, nourished by
science, of nature as a realm of causal relations. For ages, man had
no such conception; all activities were thought of as acts. Nature,
man and the gods acted together in a sort of social whole. Law, as we
understand the term in science, would have had no {115} meaning to
primitive man just as it has little meaning for many at the present day.

It is very interesting to study the development of the idea of
providence. It means foresight and the care which renders foresight
praiseworthy. The more the gods were given character and identified
with the life of the community, the more they were thought of as
guardians anxious for the good of their people. As superhuman, they
were gifted with knowledge of events to come and with plans for the
welfare and happiness of their worshipers. The social relations of the
gods inevitably brought them into transforming touch with the ethical
progress of humanity. They became ideals reflecting back the highest
of which man could conceive.

In Christianity, we have a most striking instance of this ethical
transformation of the one deity who is the superhuman agent _par
excellence_. He is the father, kindly and loving, merciful and
bountiful, who looks after the welfare of his children and plans their
individual lives and the course of civilization. The evolution of God
on its ethical side has reached its high point. From the philosophical
side, this evolution was practically a foregone conclusion. Just
because God was conceived socially, he could not escape this goal.
Hosea and Jesus took the direction which ethical idealists could not
help but take.

Let us examine the consequences of this assumption of an omnipotent,
omniscient and ethically perfect agent who acts in nature and in human
history. Simply by deducing t