our mind together with your earliest
feelings. Your first glimpses of mortal vicissitudes have coincided with
the awe and glitter of sacramental moments in which those _numina_ were
invoked; and on that deeper level of experience, in those lower reaches
of irrationalism in which such impressions lie, they constitute a mystic
resource subsisting beneath all conventions and overt knowledge. When
the doctors blunder--as they commonly do--the saints may find a cure;
after all, the saints' success in medicine seems to a crude empiricism
almost as probable as the physicians'. Special and local patrons are the
original gods, and whatever religious value speculative and cosmic
deities retain they retain surreptitiously, by virtue of those very
bonds with human interests and passionate desires which ancestral demons
once borrowed from the hearth they guarded, the mountain they haunted,
or the sacrifice they inhaled with pleasure, until their hearts softened
toward their worshippers. In itself, and as a minimised and retreating
theology represents it, a universal power has no specific energy, no
determinate interest at heart; there is nothing friendly about it nor
allied to your private necessities; no links of place and time fortify
and define its influence. Nor is it rational to appeal for a mitigation
of evils or for assistance against them to the very being that has
decreed and is inflicting them for some fixed purpose of its own.

[Sidenote: Refuge taken in the supernatural.]

Paganism or natural religion was at first, like so many crude religious
notions, optimistic and material; the worshipper expected his piety to
make his pot boil, to cure his disease, to prosper his battles, and to
render harmless his ignorance of the world in which he lived. But such
faith ran up immediately against the facts; it was discountenanced at
every turn by experience and reflection. The whole of nature and life,
when they are understood at all, have to be understood on an opposite
principle, on the principle that fate, having naturally furnished us
with a determinate will and a determinate endowment, gives us a free
field and no favour in a natural world. Hence the retreat of religion to
the supernatural, a region to which in its cruder forms it was far from
belonging. Now this retreat, in the case of classic paganism, took place
with the decay of military and political life and would have produced an
ascetic popular system, some compound of