ages. These last are not wholly given up, but they are less prominent
than in Judaism and Zoroastrianism. It is to the insight of the
individual founders that this relative freedom from local features is
due. This characteristic does not necessarily carry with it superiority
in ethical and general religious conceptions.

A different line of cleavage is indicated by the designation "religions
of redemption." In one sense all religions come under this head,[2100]
for all have for their object the freeing man from the ills of life. In
a higher sense the term 'redemption' means deliverance from the power
of sin and from its punishment, particularly in the world to come. This
meaning appears in definite form in Buddhism and Christianity, and
somewhat less distinctly in Mithraism and the later Judaism; in the Old
Testament religion and Islam it is not clearly stated. As it appears in
germinal form in the lower cults, its development may be traced up to
its culmination in the systems in which man is freed from moral taint
through the agency of an individual savior or in accordance with a
cosmic ethical law.

+1152+. Unity exists among the lowest and among the highest religious
systems. Among savage and half-civilized cults there are no important
differences--they all have the same ideas respecting the nature and
functions of supernatural Powers and the ways of approaching them.[2101]
In the higher cults a process of differentiation goes on for a certain
time while each is developing its special characteristics, and then a
counter-movement sets in--they all tend to come together by suppressing
local features and emphasizing general ideas.[2102] Thus at the present
day there are groups of Buddhists, Zoroastrians, Jews, Christians, and
Moslems that, without abandoning their several faiths, find themselves
in substantial accord on some essential points. The unity of savages is
the uniformity of undeveloped thought; the later unity rests on
discrimination between fundamentals and accessories.

+1153+. Tabulated classifications of religions, it would seem, must be
arbitrary and misleading--they give undue prominence to some one
religious fact, they maim the individuality of cults, and they obscure
the relations between certain cults by putting these into different
divisions. The true relations between the various religious systems may
be brought out by comparisons. In this way individuality and unitary
character may be preserved i