It is, indeed, not too much to say that a theological training tends to prevent a rational comprehension of religion in both its normal and abnormal manifestations. Religious phenomena are not affiliated to phenomena as a whole; they are treated as quite distinct from the rest of life, possessing both an independent origin and justification. The consequence is that what are usually called studies of religion move round and round the same circle of ideas, and a revolution is mistaken for progress. Genuine enlightenment has come to us from men who have attacked the subject from a quite different point of view. They recognised that whether the religious idea was accepted as true or rejected as false, it could not be separated from that host of ideas and beliefs which make up the psychological side of the social structure. It was to be studied as a piece of natural history first of all. Whether it involved more than this they left to be settled later. It cannot be said that they belittled the _power_ of religion; on the contrary, the investigations showed it to be one of the most potent of the forces that shape social institutions. But they demonstrated the absurdity of placing religion in a category of its own. As an objective fact, they showed that religion was subject to the same forces that determine the form of other objective facts. As a culture fact, they traced its connection with corresponding phases of social development; and as a psychological fact, they demonstrated its workings to be in harmony with workings of normal psychological laws. Five thousand years of theological study had left the world as ignorant of the nature of religious phenomena as it was in the days of ancient Chaldea. Fifty years of scientific study has served to make at least a broad path through what was hitherto an impenetrable jungle.