“The primitive savage knows so little about nature that he largely runs cross-grained with her, and nature punishes him for every violation of her laws. He sees, hears and feels so many things that he can not account for. He sees the lofty tree torn to splinters by a flash of lightning. He hears the awful peal of thunder. He believes that nothing can happen without a personal agency, yet he sees no such agency. Again, at one time his abode is destroyed by an earthquake, or a sudden volcanic eruption; at another time it is inundated by a flood. At one season of the year he suffers from drought; at another season he is visited by destructive tornadoes and hailstorms. His improvidence often causes him to starve; his imprudence to go to war; his ignorance to be visited by painful and incurable epidemic, etc. He also has fearful dreams and sometimes meets raving maniacs. All these things are beyond his understanding. He can see no cause for them and, therefore, attributes them to supernatural agencies. He is pinched and punished by nature so often for violating her laws, the existence of which he knows nothing, that he is almost afraid to stir. He is a rude, cruel creature himself, and, therefore, has also a cruel god. His god, like himself, delights in torture. The savage delights in receiving the humiliation and services of his ‘inferiors,’ and imagines that his all-powerful god has similar feelings and requires the same of him. “Thus you see how deities are born. The savage has many of them, because his mind is incapable of comprehending how _one_ can rule _all things_; they are also rude and cruel like himself. He puts the same sentiments in his deities that he feels in his own breast. A person who can believe that an all-powerful God finds delight and pleasure in torturing a creature for all eternity, must have some mean blood in his own veins, for it is very probable that the cruelest person that ever lived would get his revenge satisfied by torturing his worst enemy for less than _half_ an eternity. Thus, such a person makes his God meaner, more cruel, more revengeful than that person is himself. The savage knows of but few natural laws, and hence he puts nearly everything under the immediate and arbitrary supervision of his deities, whose anger is very easily excited. But as man becomes more and more civilized, his deities grow less in number; they also become kinder and more abstract. The process of discovering laws continues, until at last he concludes that all things are governed and maintained by law, and that wherever men have not yet discovered the law of a certain phenomena, their limited knowledge is at fault. Thus gradually as the mind unfolds and the heart improves, the supernatural is step by step brought within the domain of the natural, and the personal deities slowly become identical and at one with the Great Fact of the universe.