y satisfying to the personal need of religion is one which
goes beyond rites and ceremonies: it is that a man shall love his
neighbour and his God.

But in thus becoming personal, religion involved man's fellow-men as
much as himself. In becoming personal thus, religion became, thereby,
more than ever before, the relation of the community to its God. The
relation however is no longer that the community admits the
transgressions of some one of its members: it prays for the
forgiveness of 'our trespasses'; and though it prays for each of its
members, still it is the community that prays and worships and comes
before its God, as it has done from the beginning of the history of
religion. It is with rites of worship that the community, at any
period in the history of religion, draws nigh to its god; for its
inward purpose cannot but reveal itself in some outward manifestation.
Indeed it seeks to manifest itself as naturally and as necessarily as
thought found expression for itself in the languages it has created;
and, though the re-action of forms of worship upon religion sometimes
results, like the re-action of language upon thought, in misleading
confusion, still, for the most part, language does serve to express
more or less clearly--indeed we may say more and more clearly--that
which we have it in us to utter.

As there are more forms of speech than one, so there are more forms of
religion than one; and as the language of savages who can count no
higher than three is inadequate for the purposes of the higher
mathematics, so the religion of man in the lower stages of his
development is inadequate, compared with that of the higher stages.
Nevertheless the civilised man can come to understand the savage's
form of speech; and it would be strange to say that the savage's form
of speech, or that his form of religion, is unintelligible nonsense.
Behind the varieties of speech and of religion there is that in the
spirit of man which is seeking to express itself and which is
intelligible to all, because it is in all. Though few of us understand
any but civilised languages, we feel no difficulty in believing that
savage languages not merely are intelligible but must have sprung from
the same source as our own, though far inferior to it for every
purpose that language is employed to subserve. The many different
forms of religion are all attempts--successful in as many very various
degrees as language itself--to give expression to