Before religious emotion could make any approximation to the devout feelings of a modern Christian, it was necessary to eliminate all these licentious, cruel, and blasphemous features of worship—­the eating or slaughtering of human victims, the obscene orgies, as well as the spiteful and revengeful acts toward disobedient gods.  The progress—­like the Evolution of Romantic Love—­has been from the sensual and selfish to the supersensual and unselfish.  In the highest religious ideal, love of God takes the place of fear, adoration that of terror, self-sacrifice that of self-seeking.  But we are still very far from that lofty ideal.

“The lazzarone of Naples prays to his patron saint to favor his choice of a lottery ticket; if it turns out an unlucky number he will take the little leaden image of the saint from his pocket, revile it, spit on it, and trample it in the mud.”

“The Swiss clergy opposed the system of insuring growing crops because it made their parishioners indifferent to prayers for their crops” (Brinton, R.S., 126, 82).  These are extreme cases, but Italian lazzaroni and Swiss peasants are by no means the only church-goers whose worship is inspired not by love of God but by the expectation of securing a personal benefit.  All those who pray for worldly prosperity, or do good deeds for the sake of securing a happy hereafter for their souls, take a selfish, utilitarian view of the deity, and even their gratitude for favors received is too apt to be “a lively sense of possible favors to come.”  Still, there are now not a few devotees who love God for his own sake; and who pray not for luxuries but that their souls may be fortified in virtue and their sympathies widened.  But it is not necessary to dwell on this theme any longer, now that I have shown what I started out to demonstrate, that religious emotion is very complex and variable, that in its early stages it is made up of feelings which are not loving, reverential, or even respectful, but cruel, sacrilegious, criminal, and licentious; that religion, in a word, has (like love, as I am trying to prove) passed through coarse, carnal, degrading, selfish, utilitarian stages before it reached the comparatively refined, spiritual, sympathetic, and devotional attitude of our time.

Besides the growing complexity of the religious sentiment and its gradual ennoblement, there are two points I wish to emphasize.  One is that there are among us to-day thousands of intelligent and refined agnostics who are utter strangers to all religious emotions, just as there are thousands of men and women who have never known and never will know the emotions of sentimental love.  Why, then, should it seem so very unlikely that whole nations were strangers to such love (as they were strangers to the higher religious sentiment), even though they were as intelligent as the Greeks and Romans?  I offer this consideration not as a conclusive argument, but merely as a means of overcoming a preconceived bias against my theory.