in nature. The appeal to superhuman, personal agency to
account for such events presupposes their occurrence, while the belief
in their occurrence is psychologically based upon the acceptance of
such supernatural agency. Hence it is probable that both beliefs will
fall together. In the meantime, they give one another mutual support.
He who believes in supernatural agency is the more likely to be
credulous in regard to testimony advanced in its favor.

Nature was at first regarded as a realm in which personal agency ruled.
Yahweh thundered from Sinai and rode in the tempest. Apollo guided the
horses of the sun. The gods did things in nature directly, much as man
does them, only they are able to do things that man cannot do. By will
and word of command, they make the mountains tremble and the hills to
shake. But gradually man came to conceive nature as a self-contained
realm in which parts affected one another. We owe the beginning of
this view to the Greeks. They developed, from the first, a way of
approach to events which was absolutely opposed to the older outlook.
As nature became, for man, more and more self-sufficient and capable of
explaining what occurred within it, there was less need to appeal to an
agent of the old mythical sort.

Religion is rightly anthropomorphic, just as ethics is. Man's welfare
and destiny are properly and inevitably the important questions for
man, and he naturally approached the world with these problems in mind.
He used personal and social categories in his vague thinking about his
environment. The discovery that nature {121} did not work that way was
made slowly and only after comparative civilization had brought leisure
and safety. Even to-day, the intellectual restraint, which the
application of impersonal and non-moral concepts to nature demands, is
distasteful to the majority. But this restraint will become less and
less as man is introduced from childhood to a world of law and order to
which he can adapt himself with a fair measure of success. His eyes
will remove themselves from far horizons and turn to the world around
him, nor will he dream of a transcendent realm of which earthly things
are only the appearance and veil. He will seek his welfare and find
his destiny among his fellows during the normal time allotted to his
species. Banded with them, he will become an active and clear-eyed
worker for the four great blessings which, he finds, are within his
grasp,