But, while implying from the first something of a moral relationship between man and the object of his worship, religion does not always conceive of that Object as necessarily holy or perfectly wise. There are religions which are both immoral and childish. They have in them no principle of growth, and therefore they are the opponents alike of moral and intellectual progress. _Tantum relligio potuit suadere malorum_ is the reflexion of Christian apologists, as well as of the Roman poet, on the religions of heathenism. Hence, it is argued, 'Religion is the enemy of morals and of science. Away with it. It is a mere matter of feeling, which cannot and ought not to stand before the imperious challenge of conscience and reason.' Such a view has both truth and falsehood in it. The religious idea of God must be able to justify itself to our moral and to our rational nature, on pain of ceasing to exist. But religion cannot be thus shut up to one part of our nature, nor can one part of our nature be set against the rest. There is, as Herbert Spencer is fond of pointing out[77], a kind of idolatry of reason in the present day. Reason has exposed many superstitions only to become itself the final object of superstition. Men forget that, after all, reasoning is only 're-coordinating states of consciousness already coordinated in certain simpler ways,' and that that which is unreasoned is not always irrational. Rationality in man is not shut up in one air-tight compartment. 'There is no feeling or volition which does not contain in it an element of knowledge[78].' This is the truth which Hegel has seized when he speaks of religion as 'reason talking naively.' You can no more shut up faith to the compartment of feeling than reason to the compartment of the intellect. Religion claims the whole man, and true religion is that which can make good its claim. The natural history of religion, then, is the history of the process by which that which has its secret birthplace behind all the distinctions of modern psychology, establishes its claim on man, absorbing into itself all that is best and truest in his moral and intellectual being, as conscience and reason successively emerge into conscious activity: while, from another point of view, it is the progressive purification of the religious idea of God till He is revealed as, what He is to a thinking Christian of to-day, the Object of reverent worship, the moral ideal, the truth of nature and of man.