Toward this unknown power, or powers, his thought reaches out, and he begins to try to explain it or them.  He forms all kinds of crude and fantastic theories about these invisible forces.  At first he is apt to think that there are a great many of them; it is long before he clearly understands that there can be but One Supreme.  The moral quality of the being or beings whom he thus conceives is not clearly discerned by him; he is apt to think them fickle, jealous, revengeful, and cruel; most often he ascribes to them his own frailties and passions.

In some such way as this, then, religion begins.  It is the response of the human nature to impressions made upon the mind and heart of man by the universe in which he lives.  These impressions are not illusions, they are realities.  All men experience them.  Something is here in the world about us which appeals to our feelings and awakens our intellects.  Being made as we are, we cannot escape this influence.  It awes us, it fills us with wonder and fear and desire.

Then we try to explain it to ourselves, and in the beginning we frame a great many very imperfect explanations.  Sometimes we imagine that this power is located in some tree or rock or river; sometimes it is an animal; sometimes it is supposed to exist in invisible spirits or demons; sometimes the sky or the ocean represents it, or one of the elements, like fire, is conceived to be its manifestation; sometimes the greater planets are the objects of reverence; sometimes imaginary deities are conceived and images of wood or stone are carved by which their attributes are symbolized.

These religious conceptions of the primitive races seem to us, now, as we look back upon them from the larger light of the present day, to be grotesque and unworthy; we wonder that men could ever have entertained such notions of deity, and we are sometimes inclined, because of these crudities, to dismiss the whole subject of religion as but a farrago of superstitions.  But these imperfect conceptions do not discredit religion; they are rather witnesses to its reality.  You might as well say that the speculations and experiments of the old alchemists prove that there is no truth in chemistry; or that the guesses of the astrologers throw doubt on the science of astronomy.  The alchemists and the astrologers were searching blindly for truth which they did not find, but the truth was there; the fetish worshipers and the magicians and the idolaters were also, as Paul said, seeking after the unknown God.  But they were not mistaken in the principal object of their search; what they sought was there, and the pathetic story of the long quest for God is a proof of the truth of Paul’s saying, that God has made men and placed them in the world “that they should seek God, if haply they might feel after him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us.”  It was not a delusion, it was a tremendous reality that they were dealing with.  The fact that they but dimly conceived it does not lessen the greatness of the reality.