Given an intelligent and benevolent author of the universe, it is not perhaps very difficult to show that any further religious belief approximates to the truth in the measure that it satisfies the more highly developed rational needs of mankind. It is not seriously denied any longer that religion is an instinct with man, however it may be lacking in some individuals or dormant in others. We have savages at both ends of the scale of civilization, but man is none the less a political creature; nor does the existence of idiots and deaf mutes and criminals at all affect the fact that he is a reasoning and speaking and ethical animal. As soon as he wakes to consciousness, he feels that he is part of a whole, one of a multitude; and that as he is related to his fellow-parts--equals or inferiors--so also is he related to the Whole which is above him and greater than all put together. Religion, taken subjectively, in its loosest sense, is a man's mental and moral attitude in regard to real or imaginary superhuman beings--a definition which includes pantheism, polytheism, monotheism; moral, non-moral, and immoral religions; which prescinds from materialist or spiritualist conceptions of the universe. And by a religion in the objective sense, so far as true or false can be predicated of it, we mean a body of beliefs intended to regulate and correct man's subjective religion. It is to such systems and their parts that we think the above test of "adaptability" maybe applied as we have stated it.