considered it a useful contrivance for teaching men to dance or to march, for which purposes it should be maintained.
The difference and narrowness of these definitions arise from their failure to take hold of the essence of music, merely defining its features from the definer's point of view. So is it also with the three definitions of religion. According to the first, religion is whatever the definer thinks that he is right in believing. According to the second, it is that which, in the definer's opinion, people are wrong in believing. According to the third, it is, by the standard of the definer, what it is beneficial to make men believe. All which define, not what constitutes the essence of religion, but the definer's belief of what religion constitutes. The first supplants the notion of religion, by the faith of him who defines; the second, by the faith by which other people regard it; the third, by the faith of men in whatever may be supplied them as religion.
But what is faith? Why do people believe in what they believe? What is faith? and whence has it arisen?
Amongst the majority of the educated classes it is regarded as a settled question that the essence of every religion has its origin in the personification, deification, and worship of the forces of Nature—proceeding from superstitious fear of Nature's incomprehensible phenomena. This view is accepted, without criticism, by the educated crowd of our time, and it not
