eason when he is deducing from
principles already accepted, new precepts, or new prohibitions; but he
does not confine himself to such reasoning in the fulfilment of his
mission. He professes to have a message to give. He will accredit it by
such means as He supplies Who has sent him with this message. He will,
in order to open the consciences of his hearers, appeal to past
revelations which they have already received, and with which his new
message is in thorough harmony; but he often appeals also to his power
over nature to bear witness that the Lord of nature has sent him. The
Hebrew prophet will appeal to the teaching of the Law, will repeat the
old revelation with its old unshaken and unshakeable precepts, but he
will not stop there: he will also give signs from the Lord to prove that
he has a right to the title of prophet which he claims. Armed with this
title, he will go on to predict the coming of the Great Restorer, the
Messiah; he will insist on the judgment of all things, sure to be passed
in its appointed day; he will hint at the immortality of the soul, and
the execution of the Almighty justice on every man that lives.

It is probable enough that many of the inferior religions have grown up
with no such claim at all. The worship of ancestors, where it has
prevailed, has very likely, as has been suggested, grown out of dreams,
in which loving memory has brought back in sleep vivid images of the
dead who were reverenced while they lived, and cannot be readily
forgotten after death. Such worship barely attains to what may be called
in strictness a religion. Its connexion with the spiritual faculty, the
true seat of religion, is weak and vague. It is like the honour paid to
a sovereign residing in a distant capital, with only the difference
that those who receive this worship are supposed to reside not in a
distant capital, but in another world. So, too, the worship of fetishes,
of trees, of serpents, of the heavenly bodies, while they have some of
the inferior elements of religion in them, yet hardly deserve to be
called religions. There is in them the sentiment of fear, the
acknowledgment of persons or some resemblance of persons imperceptible
by the senses; the acknowledgment of powers possessed by these persons.
But the central idea of a rule of holiness is either altogether wanting,
or so very feeble and indistinct as to contain no promise of developing
into ultimate supremacy. These religions do not often