THE IDEA OF GOD: ITS GENESIS AND DEVELOPMENT. MODERN Science, on the one hand, and modern Philosophy, on the other, have raised in the most distinct and precise form the question as to the Genesis of the Idea of God. Religion is practically co-extensive with man; its presence, even among savage tribes, is the rule, its absence the exception. Peoples the most distant, and indeed opposite, in genius and culture and geographical position, with languages, institutions, and civilization in every shade and degree of difference, have yet a religion as their common characteristic, have never as peoples outgrown it; and changed its form, have only reformed religion renewed life. though they may have done so to find in a A nation's genius rises as its consciousness of God deepens, and the one is highest when the other is most intense.* The point * M. Renan finds the characteristic which mainly distinguishes the Indo-European and Semitic from the other races of mankind to be their moral and religious superiority (Histoire des Langues Sémitiques, pp. 500 ff. (4th ed.). where the genius and culture of Greece culminated was the very point where it had come to realize most vividly the being and government of God. The two eras in our English history most distinguished for genius and heroism, were also the most distinguished for intensity and sincerity of religious life. Religion thus seems so necessary to the nature of man, so pervades and determines his individual and social life, that Science, in its inquiries into the origin, constitution, and original condition of man, has come face to face with the questions, How did man become religious? What was the earliest form of his religious faith? How can the practical universality and apparent necessity of his belief in one God, or in many gods, be explained? The answers have, on the whole, been growingly adverse to belief in a primitive Theism. The extreme antiquity of man which Geology is inclined to affirm, the aboriginal barbarism Archæology claims to have proved, the primitive Nature-worship Comparative Mythology is said to reveal, the savage condition which Ethnology exhibits as the point from which civilization starts, and, lastly, Mr. Darwin's attempt to trace the "Descent of Man" from a "hairy" ancestor, seem to demand a natural descent of Theism from Atheism, of our religious ideas from the rude fears and frightful dreams of anthropomorphous animals. The question has also been raised, quite as sharply too, in the proposition which Positivism has enunciated as the law of historical progression. Comte's law of mental evolution is too well known to require statement here. The "theological or fictitious" is the first stage of our knowledge, "the necessary starting-point of the human mind."* Here individual and race must alike begin. In this first stage there are three progressive sub-stages-Fetichism, Polytheism, Monotheism, each transitional, each fictitious. To Positivism the primitive faith of the world is a Fetichism common to infant and savage, dog and monkey,† and the English disciples who on other points differ most from their master are yet at one with him here.‡ Of course, the agreement on this point of Science and Positivism is superficial, and should not be allowed to hide the fundamental difference of their principles and aims. Science does not, but Positivism, as Comte understood it,§ does, pronounce against the truth of theology. Mr. Darwin thinks his speculations in no way hostile to belief in the being of God,|| but M. Comte could not allow the "fictions" of the theological stage any * "Cours de Philosophie Positive," vol. i. p. 3. + Ib., vol. v. pp. 30 ff. J. S. Mill, "Auguste Comte and Positivism," p. 12, pp. 18 ff.; "System of Logic," vol. ii. p. 528. G. H. Lewes, "Hist. of Philos.," vol. iv. pp. 248 ff. (ed. 1852). Herbert Spencer, Fortnightly Review, vol. vii. (N.S.) pp. 536-550. "Cours de Philos. Posit.," vol. i. pp. 4-10; Mill, "Comte and Positivism," p. 14. "Descent of Man," vol. i. p. 65. place among the facts of the positive. The difference between Science and Positivism is thus fundamental. It is the accident of the one to ignore, but the essence of the other to contradict, theological belief. Their accidental agreement on the point in question only helps to sharpen their essential antithesis. Science does not seek by its theories to supersede or abolish religion; but Positivism dogmatically promulgates its fundamental law that it may evolve the Atheism which claims to be the new religion of humanity. The question to be here discussed is the question which modern Science and Positivism have thus combined to raise-How did the idea of God arise? What was its earliest form? What the law or what the process of its development? The questions are certainly in some respects grave enough, touch not only a point at which Christian thought and scientific inquiry come into the sharpest collision, but also the speculative tendencies most threatening to religious truth. Neither religion in general, nor Christianity in particular, depends on the answer to any question in physical science, and our faith has nothing to fear from the most searching investigations into the origin and primitive condition of man. But the tendency, on the one hand, to erect a law of evolution, enacted and administered without any conscious moral law-giver, into the grand principle of human progress, and the tendency, on the |