nbusch remarks,[71] a tribal god, fortunately
stronger than the gods of the neighboring tribes, but not fundamentally
different from them, and the way to win his favor was to sacrifice
abundantly. Later, with the development of a national spirit, the
religious ideal became a theocracy, and Yahve became a King and Supreme
Lord. In times of oppression and war Yahve was a God of War, but under
other conditions he was a God of Peace. At every step the conception of
Yahve bears a very definite relation to the material life.[72]

Marx knew that primitive religions have often a celestial pantheon
fashioned after the existing social order, kings being gods, aristocrats
being demigods, and common mortals occupying a celestial rank equal to
their terrestrial one. The celestial hierarchy of the Chinese, for
example, is an exact reproduction of the earthly hierarchy, and all the
privileges of rank are observed celestially as on earth. So in India we
find the religions reproducing in their concepts of heaven the degrees
and divisions of the various castes,[73] while our own American Indian
conceived of a celestial hunting ground, with abundant reward of game,
as his Paradise. "The religious world is but the reflex of the real
world," said Marx,[74] and the phrase has been used, both by disciples
and critics, as an attack upon religion itself; as showing that the
Marxian philosophy excludes the possibility of religious belief.
Obviously, however, the passage will not bear such an interpretation. To
say that "the religious world is but the reflex of the real world" is
by no means to deny that men have been benefited by seeking an
interpretation of the forces of the universe, or to assert that the
quest for such an interpretation is incompatible with rational conduct.
In his scorn for Bakunin's "Alliance" programme with its dogmatic
atheism[75] Marx was perfectly consistent. The passage quoted simply
lays down, in bare outline, a principle which, if well founded, enables
us to study comparative religion from a new viewpoint.

It is not a denial of religion, then, which the famous utterance of Marx
involves, but a recognition of the fact that, even as all religions may
be traced to the same fundamental instinct in mankind, so the different
forms which the religious conception assumes are, or may be, reflexes of
the material life of those making them. Thus man makes religion for
himself under the urge of his deepest instincts. The applic