ABSTRACT
Crudities in religious life must be largely ascribed to undiscriminating ethical or aesthetic reactions, to ignorant and erroneous beliefs about the world around us, and to the imperfections of the first attempts of men to understand their religion and formulate some kind of cosmological system. The suggestion has been made that as the usual forms of religion have been exploded and abandoned, the traditional dynamics of religion may be transferred to other causes. The religious emotions must be largely or entirely secularized and be put in the service of humanity. The religion of humanity is surely the religion of the nearer future. For the progress of religion has been far from even, and the back-slidings and lapses into idolatry from which certain peoples had been emancipated, the Hebrews in particular, throw a peculiarly interesting light on paganism which helps us to understand it better in all its forms.
