s there been so much of both. It
was a prodigious delusion to imagine that work could be done by magic;
and the desperate appeal which human weakness has made to prayer, to
castigations, to miscellaneous fantastic acts, in the hope of thereby
bending nature to greater sympathy with human necessities, is a pathetic
spectacle; all the more pathetic in that here the very importunity of
evil, which distracted the mind and allowed it no choice or
deliberation, prevented very often those practical measures which, if
lighted upon, would have instantly relieved the situation. Religion when
it has tried to do man's work for him has not only cheated hope, but
consumed energy and drawn away attention from the true means of success.

[Sidenote: and of mythology.]

[Sidenote: Their imaginative value.]

No less useless and retarding has been the effort to give religion the
function of science. Mythology, in excogitating hidden dramatic causes
for natural phenomena, or in attributing events to the human values
which they might prevent or secure, has profoundly perverted and
confused the intellect; it has delayed and embarrassed the discovery of
natural forces, at the same time fostering presumptions which, on being
exploded, tended to plunge men, by revulsion, into an artificial
despair. At the same time this experiment in mythology involved
wonderful creations which have a poetic value of their own, to offset
their uselessness in some measure and the obstruction they have
occasioned. In imagining human agents behind every appearance fancy has
given appearances some kinship to human life; it has made nature a mass
of hieroglyphics and enlarged to that extent the means of human
expression. While objects and events were capriciously moralised, the
mind's own plasticity has been developed by its great exercise in
self-projection. To imagine himself a thunder-cloud or a river, the
dispenser of silent benefits and the contriver of deep-seated universal
harmonies, has actually stimulated man's moral nature: he has grown
larger by thinking himself so large.

Through the dense cloud of false thought and bad habit in which religion
thus wrapped the world, some rays broke through from the beginning; for
mythology and magic expressed life and sought to express its conditions.
Human needs and human ideals went forth in these forms to solicit and to
conquer the world; and since these imaginative methods, for their very
ineptitude, rode somewha