Religion does not begin with the Incarnate Christ. He is not the first revelation of God, but His last and complete revelation. Through the personal message of the Incarnate One correcting errors, interpreting and confirming mysteries, and thus revealing the rational in what is inexplicable and indefinable otherwise, comes the interpretation of man’s natural religion. The fulfilment of all religion is Jesus Christ; without Whom, religion has ever degenerated into superstition. In its primary meaning, Religion is the law of relation—personal relation to all that is outside of self—to God, to one’s own complex nature, to man, and to the world. And since the law of relation is personal, it is susceptible of an infinite variety of interpretations and applications as personality grows and expands. Upon the growth of the religious sense, therefore, depends the progress of moral and spiritual character. The source of enlightenment for the savage is the great Book of Nature, God’s first volume of His Self-revelation. In the interpretation of this book, manifold elements enter, combining to yield many lessons from its living chapters. The initial question of all peoples as they looked out upon the world has been: Whence came it? And upon the forces of nature: What are they? In a land filled with wild beasts and reptiles, visited by storms and floods, subject to earthquakes and volcanoes, its people a prey to disease and death, what is the explanation that the African has given? What has he thought of sun, moon and stars, and of earth itself? It is safe to say that his answers to these questions have been pretty much what other primitive peoples have given. If the wind blows, it is a spirit grown restless; if the lightning flashes, it is the angry hiss of a malignant spirit; if sun and moon travel through the air, they are powerful gods, far removed, but remotely affecting the earth; if an eclipse comes, the gods in anger hide their faces; if wild beasts roar and serpents hiss, these are the emissaries of evil spirits. Thus everything that moves is endowed with life and intelligence. The Eskimo, for instance, is persuaded that a watch is a living thing because its parts move. Naturally, the African first feared the mysterious living spirits; then sought to pacify and bribe by the only offerings valuable in his own eyes—the food and drink which satisfied and made content. His idea of spirits was the reflection of his scant knowledge of himself—a half-true, half-false, canon of interpretation which becomes wholly false when the other half is unknown or forgotten; for the idea of self must also be the reflection of God’s knowledge of us and of His purpose for us and our knowledge of Him.