Roman theology and religion comprise almost identical forms of the three fundamental elements.  The names are changed, and Zeus becomes Jove, his wife Hera is Juno, Ares is Mars, and Hermes is called Mercury.  In all other respects, however, the two systems are as much alike as the Greek and Roman languages and Greek and Roman physique.

The religions of savagery are far less analytical, and much more naive in their reference of natural happenings to the direct interposition of malevolent and benevolent spirits.  Their gods are numerous as in Greek religion, and likewise one of them is usually set up as the superior deity, to be the Tirawa of the Indian, the greater Atua of Polynesia, and the Mumbo Jumbo of a West African negro.  There is no centralization of the supernatural powers, as in the Jehovah of Judaism and the still subtler Brahma of the Asian.  Then, too, the gods must be concretely materialized for purposes of worship and sacrifice; consequently idols are made, to be regarded as the actual spirits themselves permanently or for the time being, and not viewed as representations of an ideal, like the statues of more advanced peoples.  The immortal state is described in low religions in various ways that seem to be determined by what the believer himself most desires.  The spirit of an American Indian goes to the happy hunting-grounds, where it mounts a spirit pony and forever pursues the ghosts of bison which it kills with spirit bow and arrows; to provide these necessaries his earthly possessions are laid beside his dead body.  The Norseman was conducted to Valhalla and, attended by the Valkyrie as handmaidens, he eternally drank mead from the skull of an enemy and gloried over his mundane prowess in battle.  It is unnecessary to expand the foregoing list, because the examples sufficiently represent the various grades of human religions.  Regarding them as typical, we can see how universal are the three fundamental ideas with which we are concerned.  Every race has its own conception of future bliss, as well as its conception of responsibility to the immortal and supernatural powers of the universe.  Whatever may be the actual reality, and however closely the conceptions of one or another religion may approximate to the truth, such reality and approximation are not the subjects of the present discussion.  Nor is it our purpose to bring out more explicitly the genetic relationship of one religion to another; the evolution of Buddhism from Brahmanism, the origin of Christianity from Judaism, and the divergent development of the several creeds of Christendom amply illustrate the nature of religious history.  It is evolution here as elsewhere and everywhere.

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Having distinguished the three general elements of all religions, beyond which everything else is of minor importance, we now turn to the question as to the natural origin of these elements.  Clearly they cannot arise independently, for the belief in supernatural and eternal spirits is closely connected with the conception of an immortal soul.