hich it is found. I am led to
refer to this by the false light it has thrown on religious history.
Herbert Spencer remarks in one of his essays:[236-1] "All religious
creeds, during the eras in which they are severally held, are the best
that could be held." "All are good for their times and places." So far
from this being the case, there never has been a religion but that an
improvement in it would have straightway exerted a beneficent effect.
Man, no matter what his condition, can always derive immediate good
from higher conceptions of Deity than he himself has elaborated. Nor is
the highest conception possible an idealization of self, as I have
sufficiently shown in a previous chapter, but is one drawn wholly from
the realm of the abstract. Moreover, as a matter of history, we know
that in abundant instances, the decay of nations can be traced largely
to the base teachings of their religious instructors. To maintain that
such religions were "the best possible ones" for the time and place is
the absurdest optimism. In what a religion shares of the abstractly true
it is beneficent; in what it partakes of the untrue it is deleterious.
This, and no other canon, must be our guide.

The ideas of religious history obey the same laws as other historic
ideas. They grow, decay, are supplanted and revive again in varying
guises, in accordance with the processes of organic nutrition as
influenced by the truth or falsity of their component ideas. Their
tendency to personification is stronger, because of the much greater
nearness they have to the individual desire. The one aspiration of a
high-spirited people when subjugated will be freedom; and in the lower
stages of culture they will be very certain to fabricate a myth of a
deliverer to come.

In like manner, every member of a community shares with his fellow
members some wish, hope or ambition dependent on unknown control and
therefore religious in character, which will become the "formative idea"
of the national religious development.

Of the various ideas in religious history there are three which, through
their permanence and frequent revival, we may justly suppose in
accordance with the above-mentioned canons to contain a large measure of
truth, and yet to be far from wholly true. They may be considered as
leading moments in religious growth, yet withal lacking something or
other essential to the satisfaction of the religious sentiment. The
first of these is the idea of