observation. The child is vastly more emotional than the
man, the savage than his civilized neighbor. Castren, the Russian
traveller, describes the Tartars and Lapps as a most nervous folk. When
one shocks them with a sudden noise, they almost fall into convulsions.
Among the North American Indians, falsely called a phlegmatic race,
nervous diseases are epidemic to an almost unparalleled extent. Intense
thought, on the other hand, as I have before said, tends to lessen and
annul the emotions. Intellectual self-consciousness is adverse to them.

But religion, we are everywhere told, is largely a matter of the
emotions. The pulpit constantly resounds with appeals to the feelings,
and not unfrequently with warnings against the intellect. "I acknowledge
myself," says the pious non-juror, William Law, "a declared enemy to the
use of reason in religion;" and he often repeats his condemnation of
"the labor-learned professors of far-fetched book-riches."[49-1] As the
eye is the organ of sight, says one whose thoughts on such matters equal
in depth those of Pascal, so the heart is the organ of religion.[49-2]
In popular physiology, the heart is the seat of the emotions as the
brain is that of intellect. It is appropriate, therefore, that we
commence our analysis of the religious sentiment with the emotions which
form such a prominent part of it.

Now, whether we take the experience of an individual or the history of a
tribe, whether we have recourse to the opinions of religious teachers or
irreligious philosophers, we find them nigh unanimous that the emotion
which is the prime motor of religious thought is _fear_. I need not
depend upon the well-known line of Petronius Arbiter,

Primus in orbe deos fecit timor;

for there is plenty of less heterodox authority. The worthy Bishop Hall
says, "Seldom doth God seize upon the heart without a vehement
concussion going before. There must be some blustering and flashes of
the law. We cannot be too awful in our fear."[50-1] Bunyan, in his
beautiful allegory of the religious life, lets Christian exclaim: "Had
even Obstinate himself felt what I have felt of the terrors of the yet
unseen, he would not thus lightly have given us the _back_." The very
word for God in the Semitic tongues means "fear;"[50-2] Jacob swore to
Laban, "by Him whom Isaac feared;" and Moses warned his people that
"God is come, that his fear may be before your faces." To _venerate_ is
from a Sanscrit root (_sev