The religious element existing within us, and this alone, renders Religion the duty, the privilege, and the welfare of mankind. Thus Religion is not a superinduction upon the race, as some would make it appear; not an afterthought of God interpolated in human affairs, when the work was otherwise complete; but it is an original necessity of our nature; the religious element is deep and essentially laid in the very constitution of Man.
I. Now this religious element is universal. This may be proved in several ways. Whatever exists in the fundamental nature of one man, exists likewise in all men, though in different degrees and variously modified by different circumstances. Human nature is the same in the men of all races, ages, and countries. Man remains always identical, only the differing circumstances of climate, condition, culture, race, nation, and individual, modify the manifestations of what is at bottom the same. Races, ages, nations, and individuals, differ only in the various degrees they possess of particular faculties, and in the development or the neglect of these faculties. When, therefore, it is shown that the religious sentiment exists as a natural principle in any one man, its existence in all other men, that are, were, or shall be, follows unavoidably from the unity of human nature.
Again, the universality of the religious element is confirmed by historical arguments, which also have some force. We discover religious phenomena in all lands, wherever Man has advanced above the primitive condition of mere animal wildness. Of course there must have been a period in his development when the religious faculties had not come to conscious activity: but after that state of spiritual infancy is passed by, religious emotions appear in the rudest and most civilized state; among the cannibals of New Zealand and the refined voluptuaries of old Babylon; in the Esquimaux fisherman and the Parisian philosopher. The subsequent history of men shows no period in which
bus, Lib. I. It may surprise some men that a Pagan should come at the truth which lies at the bottom of all moral obligation, while so many Christian moralists have shot wide of the mark. See the discussion of the same subject, and a very different conclusion, in Paley's Moral Philosophy, and Dymond's Essays. See the heathen witnesses collected in Taylor, Elements of the Civil Law; Lond. 1786, p. 100, et seq.
