[Footnote 6:  The courage involved in all live religion normally coexists with a certain modesty or humility.  I have tried to work out this point elsewhere in a short study entitled The Birth of Humility.]

We must go on, however, to consider religion sociologically.  A religion is the effort to face crisis, so far as that effort is organized by society in some particular way.  A religion is congregational—­that is to say, serves the ends of a number of persons simultaneously.  It is traditional—­that is to say, has served the ends of successive generations of persons.  Therefore inevitably it has standardized a method.  It involves a routine, a ritual.  Also it involves some sort of conventional doctrine, which is, as it were, the inner side of the ritual—­its lining.

Now in what follows I shall insist, in the first instance, on this sociological side of religion.  For anthropological purposes it is the sounder plan.  We must altogether eschew that “Robinson Crusoe method” which consists in reconstructing the creed of a solitary savage, who is supposed to evolve his religion out of his inner consciousness:  “The mountain frowns, therefore it is alive”; “I move about in my dreams whilst my body lies still, therefore I have a soul,” and so on.  No doubt somebody had to think these things, for they are thoughts.  But he did not think them, at any rate did not think them out, alone.  Men thought them out together; nay, whole ages of living and thinking together have gone to make them what they are.  So a social method is needed to explain them.

The religion of a savage is part of his custom; nay, rather, it is his whole custom so far as it appears sacred—­so far as it coerces him by way of his imagination.  Between him and the unknown stands nothing but his custom.  It is his all-in-all, his stand-by, his faith and his hope.  Being thus the sole source of his confidence, his custom, so far as his imagination plays about it, becomes his “luck.”  We may say that any and every custom, in so far as it is regarded as lucky, is a religious rite.

Hence the conservatism inherent in religion.  “Nothing,” says Robertson Smith, “appeals so strongly as religion to the conservative instincts.”  “The history of religion,” once exclaimed Dr. Frazer, “is a long attempt to reconcile old custom with new reason, to find a sound theory for absurd practice.”  At first sight one is apt to see nothing but the absurdities in savage custom and religion.  After all, these are what strike us most, being the curiosity-hunters that we all are.  But savage custom and religion must be taken as a whole, the bad side with the good.  Of course, if we have to do with a primitive society on the down-grade—­and very few that have been “civilizaded,” as John Stuart Mill terms it, at the hands of the white man are not on the down-grade—­its disorganized and debased custom no longer serves a vital function.  But a healthy society is bound, in a wholesale way, to