What is the origin of religion?

At present at all events the shallower species of materialists' favourite term, "superstition," does not approve itself to the more thoughtful; and, while carefully avoiding the term, all such seem unable altogether to escape some slight contamination of the theory of the innate consciousness in man of a power and personality higher than human. Thus Haeckel, while finding the crude beginnings of religion to spring "partly from the hereditary superstition of primate ancestors, partly from ancestor-worship, as well as from habits which have become traditional," concludes his formidable list with the very indefinite phrase, "and various emotional impulses." Yes, just somewhere in that latter region will be found the solution of the problem — Why is religion such a universal feature, so inseparable from man wherever found? Exploration, discovery, the progress of your ethnological study have but multiplied the instances of its occurrence, without solving the question of its origin. No solution seems possible but that which explains its unexceptional appearance and ineradicable nature, in the first place, by some inherent impulse in men, by an ingrained consciousness of a higher power.

Now at this second intervention of God in judgment they are dispersed abroad, and though violence and corruption may be somewhat kept in check by the sword, yet idolatry — a new form of evil — is added to the black catalogue of their sins. It is a religious sin, if such an epithet may be used. It is the power of evil working upon the religious element of fallen nature. For man must have a religion of some sort. Whatever atheists may say, this is a necessity of his psychological nature. It may be asked why there is no record of idolatry before the flood. Because the instincts of mere human nature, fallen and strong in sin, and as ready for idolatry then as now, were over-weighted by the presence of a nature and a will stronger than their own. The religious element was not: then (apparently) worked upon by Satan. Violence and corruption, not idolatry, filled the whole earth.

Then all were so much under demoniacal power — such as has never been known since — that Satan had no need to drag men into the debasing systems of idolatry and world's religion. Now it is his most successful means of ruining souls. Man's religion is nothing but the embodiment of his own evil thoughts and imagination; and the reflex image of his gods, whether mental or material, falls upon his soul with a deeper darker dye. This faculty with which God endowed man, that he might be able to worship Him, became through sin and corruption the means of his greatest debasement. Man became a worshipper of idols, and so thoroughly ruined through this very faculty that now nothing less than the sovereign power of God in grace can bring him back to be a worshipper of God. His religion made him worse morally. The more religious, the more immoral. Before the flood Satan's power was seen in the universal corruption; after, in idolatry. Not that corruption ceased, but idolatry was added, and perhaps the more dominant.

1910 30 On the threshold of a new world, then, only one God was known, owned, or worshipped; only one form of religious belief existed. Whence have come the others? From development of that? or through degeneration from it? Is it progress or lapse that time has brought? Many, reasoning from the undoubted progress of the race in material things, and in the intellectual sphere also, imagine a similar progress to have taken place spiritually. The illustration of man groping his way from primitive ignorance through hideous nature-worship, and polytheism, to true knowledge of God, is a common, if erroneous one. The truth is, according to this chapter, that the progress is in exactly the reverse direction. "Knowing God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful." That is to say, primarily He was known, conceived of objectively, present to the mind of man as existing and almighty. And such knowledge, remark, man is credited with, not as a deduction logically and laboriously arrived at, but as an assurance he is originally furnished with. The glorifying of Him, as such, however, men soon ceased to render, the experience of His continued goodness awakening no grateful response. Practical recognition of God was thus abandoned, and that right early. The process of His dethronement from their hearts was begun, little as they knew of how soon the vacancy thus created would be re-inhabited. A scheme for man's deception the enemy had prepared of which this was, in reality, the initial step. Thereafter the knowledge and remembrance of God gradually faded. Especially so when, "becoming vain in their reasonings, their undiscerning heart became darkened."

The corrupt desires of the will of man, acting upon his imagination, and re-acted on by a darkened conscience, produced the varied forms of idolatrous worship. The same heart which is by nature fundamentally averse from holiness, is constitutionally prone to religious observance. There is an innate and indwelling consciousness of personal insufficiency, which renders man incapable of simple independence of some power mightier than himself. A god, in some shape, is a natural necessity of man. His natural desire, in his first apostacy from truth, is a god after his own heart. The image of himself is the outward expression of this. But the tendency of a mind once alienated from God is ever downwards. Birds, and quadrupeds, and creeping things display, when represented in idolatrous imagery, the progressive stages of that deterioration and debasement of the poor godless mind of nature, which finds no lifting power in itself capable of staying its descent into the low depths of utter infatuation and shame.

But there is that in God, the sense of which is with difficulty lost in man, though he be without God in the world. This has turned the sense of a being above himself, perfect in knowledge and power, a Supreme Being, into what is the fruit of imagination or servile dread - Mythology and Fetishism. The visible powers of nature were deified, because a God was wanting for the heart. The legends of ancient days were turned into myths of the gods. Terror told of a revengeful power, and a world of retribution loomed to an unsatisfied conscience. Man would animate planets, because they moved without him: he would have poetical lusts in superficial and self-satisfied Greece; more calculated sobriety in Egypt, a sunny south of gods, and northern immensity of giants, and storms, and mountains in Scandinavia; or seek to solve the mystery of good and evil in Ahriman and Ahurmazdha in Arva, or revel in monstrous reveries in India. Cruelty and poetry might divide the world under the name of gods, but behind all there was everywhere Tertullian's "Testimonium animae naturaliter christianae," an "unknown God" - a Brahm, the origin of all things, a primeval source or power.

The diversity of nations gave the heathen of old, as it gives the unbelieving now, occasion to deny the unity of the race. But God made of one (blood) every nation of men to dwell on every face of the earth, whatever local traditions aver, whatever the dreams of early poets or of later philosophers or geographers. Man readily forgot himself, as well as God. If God was unknown, so was man's origin and creation: the very formula of si deo, si deae, betrayed his ignorance. Religiousness is natural even to the most corrupt of mankind; faith acceptable to God is supernatural. Superstition suits the devil not less than scepticism. Neither pleases God, who never left man that left Him, as he was justly banished by Him but not without the testimony of creation without and of conscience within.

Man has truly been called a religious animal. He is the only part of God’s creation that has a sense of God. That sense may be perverted. Man may not like to retain God in his knowledge, but on refusing the true God he must invent a false god for he cannot get on without a god. See the old Egyptians as they worshipped the bull, the cat, the ibis, the beetle. How true it is “they … changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things.” Look at the heathen idols in India, more in number today than the dense millions who inhabit that peninsula; look at China with its heathen temples, at Japan, Africa, the Islands of the sea. Recall how in this country we once worshipped Woden and Thor and many another false god, to which our very names for the days of the week bear witness.

(1) In the rebellion of the people, human nature shows itself in the blindness and folly of its religious side. It will make a god rather than not have one, and is not competent to estimate the value of a god so made. Beyond doubt, even with the wisest of those that follow it, there is in idolatry more than the virtue of a symbolic teaching. There is a mysterious supernatural power which is supposed to reside in the image, and which, at least, has a strange fascination for men, as shown in the general spread of idolatry over the earth, its invasion of Judaism, and long afterward of Christianity. No folly seems more complete than that of bowing down to the work of one's own hands, yet here is shown out what in reality its power is. Not liking to retain God in his knowledge, man makes Him what he wishes Him to be — the reflection of his own passions and desires. These are what already control him, and so he but yields himself to their control in his idol. A new power is added to this when man's original choice becomes confirmed by the adoption of many and by lapse of time concealing its origin, so that it comes to have authority over the conscience as well as power over the heart, — authority which may soon over-top the other.

When the first nations settled down in their lands, they threw off the knowledge of God which they had inherited from Noah and his sons, and they plunged into idolatry. Rom: 1:28 says, "they did not like to retain God in their knowledge." Their conceptions of deity, under the deceptive influence of Satan, sank lower and lower. First, "they changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man"; soon, they set up beasts, then birds, and even creeping things. The worship of the serpent became popular. It was not naked savages who thus plunged deeper and deeper into the abyss of folly; for the ancient kingdoms of Babylon, Assyria, and Egypt (amongst others) possessed much learning. It is impossible for men to rise morally above the level of the gods they worship; accordingly beast-worshippers soon became beastly themselves in practise. Rom: 1:18-32 should be carefully pondered for it is God's sad description of the depths of vice and folly to which men descended when they turned their backs upon Him. Let moderns beware in their increasing godlessness.

The worship of idols — a sin which is mentioned as committed after the flood. There seems to have been a universal giving up of the knowledge of the true God. Paul, speaking of men, says that when they knew God, they glorified Him not as God, they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, notwithstanding that what may be known of God in nature, His eternal power and Godhead, was manifested to them. They degraded the worship of the true God everywhere, and idolatry became universal. In this, man had no excuse. Images were made like corruptible man, and birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things. Rom. 1:20-23. From this state Abram was rescued by the God of glory appearing to him. Scripture shows the folly of a man cutting down a tree, and burning part of it to cook his food and to warm himself, and yet making a god of the rest, and worshipping it, Isa. 44:14-17; and yet Israel, to whom God had revealed Himself, not only as Creator but in redemption, adopted these wicked follies. There were also molten images and images of stone.