Behind the external act lies the internal world of thought and feeling. The social sanction may invest the ceremony itself with so much force that the worshipper's interest may lie rather in the due performance of the rite than in the deity to whom it is addressed. The element of belief may be relatively vague and indefinite. But in the more highly organised religions belief also may externalise itself through hymn and prayer, through myth and history and prophecy. When a religion is strong enough to create a literature, a fresh object of comparison is presented. The utterances of poet and sage, of lawgiver and seer, can be set side by side. Their conceptions of the Powers towards which worship is directed can be studied; the characters and functions of the several deities can be determined. This { 22} is the intellectual element in religion. It has often been regarded as the element of most importance, because it seemed most readily to admit of the test of truth. It finds its most formal expression in the articles of a creed, and has sometimes been erected into the chief ground of the supreme arbitrament of heaven and hell.
There remains the element of feeling. This also may be so entangled in tradition, so enveloped in the pressure of surrounding influences, that it is at first obscure and indistinct. But its importance was early recognised when the origin of religion was ascribed to fear, in the oft-quoted line of the Roman Satirist Petronius Arbiter at the court of Nero (who committed suicide A.D. 66)--
In the eighteenth century the genius of Lessing (1729-1781) fastened on the feeling of the heart as the essential foundation of religion. No written record, no historical event, could guarantee its truth; that lay in the constitution of the human spirit in its interpretation of its experience. In his famous drama of "Nathan the Sage" he applied this to the representatives of three great historical religions which were thus brought together for comparison: the Christian Templar, the Mohammedan Saladin, and the Jew Nathan. Herder (1744-1803) endeavoured with the { 23} materials then at command to trace the origin and development of religion, starting from the primitive impressions made upon the mind by the world without, and sought to interpret mythology as the imaginative utterance of man's consciousness of the power, light, and life in Nature. In the next generation Schleiermacher (1767-1834) placed the essence of religion in the feeling of absolute dependence, without attempting to define the object towards which it was directed. The study of origins has passed out of the hands of the philosophers and the theologians. But it cannot dispense with psychology; and among the factors of early religious life will be found the beginnings of wonder, reverence and awe. And this element, often cruelly twisted into false and degraded forms, and sometimes refined in the higher types of mysticism into the loftiest spirituality, inheres in all practice and belief.