To compensate this, “the fearful looking forward to the wrath to come,” the fertile source of mental misery in advanced faiths, scarcely exists in those of primitive conditions. Death itself is thus deprived of its greatest terror, and the indifference with which it is met by most savages is matter of common note among travellers. Nor does there exist in primitive conditions that fertile source of human misery, religious bigotry or intolerance, with its fatal train of persecutions, torture, and suspicion. The bloodiest sacrifices of heathendom have never entailed such personal unhappiness as the gloomy fanaticism of some forms of Christianity. All these several lines of development are, it will be noted, external to religion itself. They modify it, and are modified by it. But there are other changes, wrought within the religious sense itself, which we must now consider. Religions, like all other institutions, are subject to growth and decay, evolution and retrogression, development and death. The vast majority of primitive faiths have disappeared totally, leaving no trace behind except the nameless images of their gods, or not even these. They were obliterated by conquest, or merged and lost in other forms of belief, or degenerated and petrified until they died a natural death. Others grew and extended, vitalised by new thoughts, appropriate to the new environment, or were carried far and wide by victorious rulers or enthusiastic votaries. It is generally true, as Professor Toy has observed, that, in early conditions, the life of a religion depends on the life of the tribe or state which has adopted it, and that “the larger the community, the more persistent and vigorous its religion will be.”[298] But the secret of success lay within rather than without; the particular faith must pass through certain internal transformations in order to fit it for the wider field opened to it. The chief of these stadia of progress may be described as a transference of religious thought: 1. From the object to the symbol; 2. From the ceremonial law to the personal ideal; and 3. From the tribal to the national conception of religion. 1. The rudest phases of religion connect the ideas of the Divine with particular external objects, a tree, a rock, a special place, around which grow up a series of local myths and usages. Such ideas, to develop, must break away from these connections with concrete and localised relations. They must become generalised, and the symbol be substituted for the object. Instead of a particular tree, for instance, the sign of the tree, the cross or the pole (_asherim_), will be adopted. This represents not the original object but the personified activity, the spirit or god which was supposed earlier to inhabit the given object or spot.