revelations cloaked in fable and allegory; that He allowed them to
stumble and to blunder, and to quarrel over these "revelations"; that He
allowed them to persecute, and slay, and torture each other on account
of divergent readings of his "revelations" for ages and ages; and that
He is still looking on while a number of bewildered and antagonistic
religions fight each other to achieve the survival of the fittest. Is
that a reasonable theory? Is it the kind of theory a reasonable man can
accept? Is it consonant with common sense?

Contrast that with our theory. We say that early man, having no
knowledge of science, and more imagination than reason, would be alarmed
and puzzled by the phenomena of Nature. He would be afraid of the dark,
he would be afraid of the thunder, he would wonder at the moon, at the
stars, at fire, at the ocean. He would fear what he did not understand,
and he would bow down and pay homage to what he feared.

Then, by degrees, he would personify the stars, and the sun, and the
thunder, and the fire. He would make gods of these things. He would make
gods of the dead. He would make gods of heroes. He would do what all
savage races do, what all children do: he would make legends, or fables,
or fairy tales out of his hopes, his fears, and his guesses.

Does not that sound reasonable? Does not history teach us that it is
true? Do we not know that religion was so born and nursed?

There is no such thing known to men as an original religion. All
religions are made up of the fables and the imaginations of tribes long
since extinct. Religion is an evolution, not a revelation. It has been
invented, altered, and built up, and pulled down, and reconstructed time
after time. It is a conglomeration and an adaptation, as language is.
And the Christian religion is no more an original religion than English
is an original tongue. We have Sanscrit, Latin, Greek, French, Saxon,
Norman words in our language; and we have Aryan, Semitic, Egyptian,
Roman, Greek, and all manner of ancient foreign fables, myths, and rites
in our Christian religion.

We say that Genesis was a poetic presentation of a fabulous story pieced
together from many traditions of many tribes, and recording with great
literary power the ideas of a people whose scientific knowledge was very
incomplete.

Now, I ask you which of these theories is the most reasonable; which
is the most scientific; which agrees most closely with the facts of
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