Yet it remains true that the sexual antithesis, that which mythologists call the worship of “the reciprocal principles of nature,” is interwoven with the fibre of nearly all religions, primitive or developed. Under one form or another, it is the impulse which ever appeals most potently to the human heart. The sentiment which attracts the one sex to the other, the passion of Love, exceeds all others in the power it exerts on the individual life. This it is, which in some of its forms, rude or refined, is at the root of half the expressions of the religious sentiment. We may trace it from crude and coarse beginnings in the genesiac cults of primitive peoples, through ever nobler and more delicate expressions, up through the celibate sacrifices of both sexes, spouses of God,[206] until in its complete expansion it reaches the perfect _agape_, where the union of the human with the divine in the life eternal, here on earth, or beyond, one and the same, is believed to have been reached.[207] This, the loftiest of all the religious mystical ideals is but the result of a gradual evolution from those low beginnings which I have mentioned as perceptible in most primitive religions. It is the ripened manifestation of that profound psychical truth, so incomparably expressed in the lines of the philosopher-poet, Coleridge: “All thoughts, all passions, all delights, Whatever stirs this mortal frame, All are but ministers of Love, And feed his sacred flame.” LECTURE V. Primitive Religious Expression: In the Rite. CONTENTS:—The Ritual a Mimicry of the Gods—Magical Rites—Division of Rites into I. Communal, and II. Personal. I. Communal Rites: 1. The Assemblage—The Liturgy—2. The Festal Function—Joyous Character of Primitive Rites—Commensality—The “Ceremonial Circuit”—Masks and Dramas—3. The Sacrifice—Early and Later Forms—4. The Communion with God—Pagan Eucharists. II. Personal Rites: 1. Relating to Birth—Vows and Baptism—2. Relating to Naming—The Personal Name—3. Relating to Puberty—Initiation of Boys and Girls—4. Relating to Marriage—Marriage “by Capture” and “by Purchase”—5. Relating to Death—Early Cannibalism—Sepulchral Monuments—Funerary Ceremonies—Modes of Burial—Customs of Mourning. We have seen how the religious sentiment finds expression in the Word and in the Object. It remains to consider it as revealed in the Act. This is known as the Rite or the Ritual. It is a combination of forms and ceremonies collectively known as Worship. So important is it that one eminent German authority has declared the ritual to be “the source of all religions”[208]; and Dr. W. Robertson Smith, also a profound student of the subject, has maintained that “in the study of ancient religions we must begin, not with the myth, but with the ritual”; because, he adds, “in almost every case the myth was derived from the ritual, and not the ritual from the myth.”[209]