the history of Greek religion, the sense of ritual defilement and that of moral guilt are very closely linked with one another, and the idea of an essential connection between moral and physical evil—between sin and death, for example—is found in the higher religions no less than among the primitives. Libera nos a malo is a universal prayer which answers to one of the oldest needs of human nature.
But the existence of this specifically religious need in primitive man—in other words, the naturalness of the religious attitude—is widely denied at the present day. It is maintained that primitive man is a materialist and that the attempt to find in primitive religion an obscure sense of the reality of spirit, or, indeed, anything remotely analogous to the religious experience of civilised man, is sheer metaphysical theorising.
This criticism is partly due to a tendency to identify any recognition of the religious element in primitive thought and culture with the particular theories of religious origins which have been put forward by Tylor and Durkheim.
In reality, however, the theories of the latter have much more in common with those of the modern writers whom I have mentioned than any of them have with the point of view of writers who recognise the objective and autonomous character of religion. All of them show 39
CHRISTIANITY AND T H E N E W AGE
that anti-metaphysical prejudice which has been so general during the last generation or two, and which rejects on a priori grounds any objective interpretation of religious experience.
On the Continent there is already a reaction against the idea of a ” science of religion “
which, unlike the other sciences, destroys its own object and leaves us with a residuum of facts that belong to a totally different order.
In fact, recent German writers such as Otto, Heiler, and Karl Beth tend rather to exag-gerate the mystical and intuitive character of religious experience, whether in its primitive or advanced manifestations. But in this country the anti-metaphysical prejudice is still dominant.
A theory is not regarded as ” scientific ” unless it explains religion in terms of something else— as an artificial construction from non-religious elements.
Thus Professor Perry writes : ” The idea of deity has grown up with civilisation itself, and in its beginnings it was constructed out of the most homely materials.” He holds that religion was derived not from primitive speculation or symbolism nor from spiritual experience, but from a practical observation of the phenomena of life. Its origins are to be found in the association of certain substances, such as red earth, shells, crystals, etc., with the ideas of life