I have said that the origin of all the errors which he copies from his predecessors of half a lifetime ago is the neglect of the obvious fact that _Man is a fixed type_. It is the point I so emphasized in my last chapter, because it is capital to the whole discussion. If you pretend, or try to believe, that Man alone, out of all creation, is not a definable being, but in a ceaseless process of rapid change, then, of course, you can invent at will any mythology to account for anything you prefer to hope happened to him in the past. You can imagine any monstrous lack of human faculty in the past so as to make your facts fit in with your theory. But if you regard Man as Man, since the time when first True Man (Mr. Wells’s own term) appeared upon earth; if you regard palæolithic man as Man, a known animal, just as you regard the palæolithic reindeer as a reindeer; if you consider a known thing called “Man” and not a succession of imaginary beings made up as you go along, then you have three certain guides to go upon, to wit: (1) your own knowledge of your own self, (2) your knowledge of your fellow-beings, (3) the record of Man’s actions and being since he has kept records. Let us first see what are the accompaniments of religion in the human mind, and how they tend to work in the fallen nature of man. What is the _known_ way in which the human mind proceeds in its religious activities? Those activities are all connected together by being each of them dependent on the original Idea of God. If God be, then these religious practices—sacrifices, sacraments, prayers, awe, the sanctity of special deeds, places, and things, restrictions, rituals, _Fas et nefas_—are more or less consonant to that Supreme Reality. However perverted, each religious action will, _if there be indeed a Creator and Sustainer_, correspond to and resemble what might have been an _un_perverted action of the same kind; and that _un_perverted religious action would be an action in exact tune with reality. The perverted Sacrament argues a true Sacrament; the perverted Sacrifice a true form of Sacrifice, and in general the perverted Worship a true Worship. If God be not, then Sacrifice, Sacrament, Prayer, Inhibition, Ritual, are even worse perversions than the original illusion of a God from which they all derive. These main religious functions I have just put down by their popular names. Let me give them a more exact order. They are, first of all, Veneration; next, the offerings of gratitude and propitiation, that is Sacrifice; next, the Communion of the Human Spirit with God, that is Prayer; next, a recognition of Being, spiritual and incorporeal, which involves the possibility of man’s surviving death; next, Ritual—the necessary human framework of any continuous human Veneration, Sacrifice, Prayer, or affirmation of Immortality.