Nothing excites my own suspicion of my provisional hypothesis more than its symmetry.  It really seems to fit the facts, as they appear to me, too neatly.  I would suggest, however, that ancient savage sacred hymns, and practices in the mysteries, are really rather of the nature of ‘documents;’ more so, at least, than the casual observations of some travellers, or the gossip extracted from natives much in contact with Europeans.

Supposing that the arguments in this essay met with some acceptance, what effect would they have, if any, on our thoughts about religion?  What is their practical tendency?  The least dubious effect would be, I hope, to prevent us from accepting the anthropological theory of religion, or any other theory, as a foregone conclusion, I have tried to show how dim is our knowledge, how weak, often, is our evidence, and that, finding among the lowest savages all the elements of all religions already developed in different degrees, we cannot, historically, say that one is earlier than another.  This point of priority we can never historically settle.  If we met savages with ghosts and no gods, we could not be sure but that they once possessed a God, and forgot him.  If we met savages with a God and no ghosts, we could not be historically certain that a higher had not obliterated a lower creed.  For these reasons dogmatic decisions about the origin of religion seem unworthy of science.  They will appear yet more futile to any student who goes so far with me as to doubt whether the highest gods of the lowest races could be developed, or can be shown to have been developed, by way of the ghost-theory.  To him who reaches this point the whole animistic doctrine of ghosts as the one germ of religion will appear to be imperilled.  The main practical result, then, will be hesitation about accepting the latest scientific opinion, even when backed by great names, and published in little primers.

On the hypothesis here offered to criticism there are two chief sources of Religion, (1) the belief, how attained we know not,[10] in a powerful, moral, eternal, omniscient Father and Judge of men; (2) the belief (probably developed out of experiences normal and supernormal) in somewhat of man which may survive the grave.  This second belief is not, logically, needed as given material for the first, in its apparently earliest form.  It may, for all we know, be the later of the two beliefs, chronologically.  But this belief, too, was necessary to religion; first, as finally supplying a formula by which advancing intellects could conceive of the Mighty Being involved in the former creed; next, as elevating man’s conception of his own nature.  By the second belief he becomes the child of the God in whom, perhaps, he already trusted, and in whom he has his being, a being not destined to perish with the death of the body.  Man is thus not only the child but the heir of God, a ’nurseling of immortality,’ capable of entering into eternal life.  On the moral influence of this belief it is superfluous to dwell.