ABSTRACT
Religion, group loyalty or patriotism, property, the family, and certain concepts of personal morality, not merely surround themselves with taboos, but emit passionate fumes to blind the sight and confuse the brain of timorous scrutineers. The case of religion is notorious. No truly religious person will submit his deity or his worship to cold tests of the intellect. Industrious anthropologists may track each of the holy rites back to its origins in sympathetic or imitative magic. But they will not eradicate entirely the ‘superstitious’ sentiment attaching to this magic, and to the primitive Weltanschauung of which it was a part. But the most conclusive testimony to the difficulty of a scientific study of religion is, not the emotional bias of the believer, but the counter-bias of the unbeliever, the odium anti-theologicum, so conspicuous in professing ‘rationalists’. They are not to blame. An escape from prevailing sanctities, stamped by early association upon the tender mind, can only be achieved by an emotional struggle in which the combative instinct is engaged so strongly as to leave behind a sentiment of hostility and disgust, often intensified in passionate natures by well-founded fear lest the emotional escape be incomplete, Students of comparative religion, or of the higher criticism, will be well aware of the havoc made in the application of laws of evidence to matter laden with such passionate appeal.
