Atlanta tri-weekly journal. [volume] (Atlanta, Ga.) 1920-19??, 1922-11-09
The Outline of History-By H. G. Wells
|. The Romance of Mother Earth
20. The Growing Power Of Religion

%. The Growing Power OF Religion
VTTITH the beginnings Of agriculture
Wv fresh set Of ideas arose in mems
minds. We have already indicated
how easily and naturally men may have
come to associate the idea of sowing with
burial.
Sir J. G. Frazer has pursued the devel-
opment of this association in the human
mind, linking up with it the conception of
special sacrificial persons who are killed at
seedtime, the conception of a specially
purified class Of people to kill these sacri-
fices, the first priests, and the conception of
sacrament, a ceremonial feast in which
tn tribe eats portions of the body Of the
victim in order to share in the sacrificial
benefits.
Binding Force
Out of all these factors, out Of the Old
Man tradition, out of the emotions that sur
round women for men and men for women,
out of the desire to escape infection and
uncleanness, out Of the desire for power
and success through magic, out of the sac
rificial tradition of seedtime, and out of a
! number of like beliefs and mental expert
| ments and misconceptions, a complex some
| thing was growing up in the lives of men
which was beginning to bind them together
mentally and emotionally in common life
and action This something we may call re-
| ligion (Lat. religare, to bind). 1t was not
|
tangle of ideas about commanding beings
| and spirits, about gods, about all sorts Of
| "musts" and ''must-nots.
= Like all other human matters, religion
! has grown. 1t must be clear from what
| has gone before that primative man-much
| less his ancestral apes and his ancestral
Mesozoic mammals-could have had no idea
| of God or religion; only very slowly did
| his brain and his powers of comprehension
hnon 1oh1 Ia 0P cIIn1nO anti
! Religion is something that has grown up
with and through human association, and
God has been and is still being discovered
! by man.
! This book is not theological book, and
| it is not for us to embark upon theological
| discussion; but it is a part, necessary
and central part, Of the history of man to
describe the dawn and development Of his
religious ideas and their influence upon his
activities. All these factors we have noted
must have contributed to this development,
and various writer's have laid most stress
upon one or other of them.
Sir ;. G. Frazer has been the leading
student Of the derivation of sacraments
from magic sacrifices. Grant Allen, fol-
lowing Herbert Spencer, in his Evolution
Of the Idea of God" laid stress chiefly on
the posthumous worship of the "Old Man"
Sir E. B. Tylor primitive Culture) gave
his attention mainly to the disposition of
primitive man to ascribe a soul to every OBJ
ject animate and inanimate. Mr.. A. E..
Crawley, in "The Tree of Life" has called
attention to other centers of impulse and
emotion, and particularly to sex as source
of deep excitement.
| The thing we have to bear in mind is
that Neolithic man was still mentally unde-
Iveloped, he could be confused and illogical
to a degree quite impossible to an edu-
Gated modern person. Conflicting and con-
Trajectory ideas could lie in his mind with
out challenging one another; now one thing
ruled his thoughts intensely and wildly and
now another; his fears, his acts, were still
disconnected as children's are