The ideas of religious history obey the same laws as other historic ideas. They grow, decay, are supplanted and revive again in varying guises, in accordance with the processes of organic nutrition as influenced by the truth or falsity of their component ideas. Their tendency to personification is stronger, because of the much greater nearness they have to the individual desire. The one aspiration of a high-spirited people when subjugated will be freedom; and in the lower stages of culture they will be very certain to fabricate a myth of a deliverer to come. In like manner, every member of a community shares with his fellow members some wish, hope or ambition dependent on unknown control and therefore religious in character, which will become the “formative idea” of the national religious development. Of the various ideas in religious history there are three which, through their permanence and frequent revival, we may justly suppose in accordance with the above-mentioned canons to contain a large measure of truth, and yet to be far from wholly true. They may be considered as leading moments in religious growth, yet withal lacking something or other essential to the satisfaction of the religious sentiment. The first of these is the idea of the _perfected individual_; the second the idea of the _perfected commonwealth_; the third, that of _personal survival_. These have been the formative ideas (_Ideen der Gestaltung_) in the prayers, myths, rites and religious institutions of many nations at widely separated times. Of the two first mentioned it may be said that every extended faith has accepted them to some degree. They are the secret of the alliances of religion with art, with government, with ethics, with science, education and sentiment. These alliances have often been taken by historians to contain the vital elements of religion itself, and many explanations based on one or another assumption of the kind have been proffered. Religion, while it may embrace any of them, is independent of them all. Its relations to them have been transitory, and the more so as their aims have been local and material. The brief duration of the subjection of religion to such incongenial ties was well compared by Lord Herbert of Cherbury to the early maturity of brutes, who attain their full growth in a year or two, while man needs a quarter of a century.[239-1] The inferior aims of the religious sentiment were discarded one after another to make way for higher ones, which were slowly dawning upon it. In this progress it was guided largely by the three ideas I have mentioned, which have been in many forms leading stimuli of the religious thought of the race. First, of the _idea of the perfected individual_.