We are so accustomed to think of religion as a thing between individual men and God that we can hardly enter into the idea of a religion in which a whole nation in its national organisation appears as the religious unit.

This, it may be said, is no more than a hypothesis, but it satisfies the conditions of a legitimate hypothesis, by postulating the operation of no unknown or uncertain cause, but only of that force of precedent which in all times has been so strong to keep alive religious forms of which the original meaning is lost.

In better times the religion of the tribe or state has nothing in common with the private and foreign superstitions or magical rites that savage terror may dictate to the individual.

Thus a man was born into a fixed relation to certain gods as surely as he was born into a relation to his fellow-men; and his religion... was simply one side of the general scheme of conduct prescribed for him by his position as a member of society.

We are so accustomed to think of religion as a thing between individual men and God that we can hardly enter into the idea of a religion in which a whole nation in its national organisation appears as the religious unit.

Even the highest forms of sacrificial worship present much that is repulsive to modern ideas, and in particular it requires an effort to reconcile our imagination to the bloody ritual which is prominent in almost every religion which has a strong sense of sin.

Belief in a certain series of myths was neither obligatory as a part of the true religion, nor was it supposed that, by believing, a man acquired religious merit and conciliated the favour of the gods.