Monotheism ranges from the crudest conception of a manlike god to the highest conception of a spiritual Being transcending all human qualities, attributes, or characteristics. Man began by believing in many god _things_, then in many god _persons_, then in a one god-person, then in one God who is a spirit, then in One Universal Spirit which is God. It is a far cry from the savage, manlike god of old to the conception of the Universal Spirit of the "God-drunken philosopher," Spinoza. The extreme of religious belief is that which holds that "there is nothing but God--all else is illusion," of pantheistic idealism. Buddhism (at least in its original form) discarded the idea of a Supreme Being, and held that Ultimate Reality is but Universal _Law_; hence the accusation that Buddhism is an "atheistic religion," although it is one of the world's greatest religions, having over 400,000,000 followers.
But the _beliefs_ of the religious person may be considered as resulting from intellectual processes; his religious _feelings and emotions_ arise from another part of his mental being. It is the testimony of the authorities of all religions that religious conviction is an inner experience rather than an intellectual conception. The emotional element is always active in religious manifestations everywhere. The purely intellectual religion is naught but a philosophy. Religion without feeling and emotion is an anomaly. In all true religion there exists a feeling of inner assurance and faith, love, awe, dependence, submission, reverence, gratitude, hope, and perhaps fear. The emotional element must always be present, not necessarily in the form of emotional excess, as in the case of revival hysteria or the dance of the whirling dervishes, but at least in the form of the calm, fervent feeling of "that peace which passeth understanding." When religion departs from the emotional phase it becomes merely a "school of philosophy," or an "ethical culture society."
The student must not lose sight of the uplifting influence of true religious emotion by reason of his knowledge of its lowly origin. Like the lotus, which has its roots in the slimy, filthy mud of the river, and its stem in the muddy, stagnant, and foul waters thereof, but its beautiful flower unfolded in the clear air and facing the sun, so is religious feeling responsible for some of the most beautiful and uplifting ideals and actions of the race. If its origin and history contain much that is not consistent with the highest ideals of the race to-day, it is not the fault of religion but of the race itself. Religion, like all else in the universal manifestation, is under the laws of evolution, growth, and development. What the religion of the future may be, we know not. But the prophets of the race are dreaming visions of a religion as much higher than that of to-day as the latter is higher than the crude fetichism of the savage.