In almost, if not quite, the lowest stages of human development, disease and famine are regarded as punishments which fall on the community as a whole, because the community, in the person of one of its members, has offended some supernatural power. In quite the lowest stage the guilt of the offending member is also regarded as capable of infecting the whole community; and he is, accordingly, avoided by the whole community and tabooed. Taboo is due to the collective action, and expresses the collective feeling of the community as a whole. It is from such collective action and feeling that justice has been evolved and not from individual resentment, which is still and always was something different from justice. The offences punished by the community have always been considered, so far as they are offences against morality, to be offences against the gods of the community. The fact that in course of time such offences come to be punished always as militating against the good of society testifies merely to the general assumption that the good of man is the will of God: men do not believe that murder, adultery, etc., are merely offences { xxiii} against man's laws. It is only by ignoring this patent fact that it becomes possible to maintain that religion is built upon morality, and that we are discovering religion to be a superfluous superstructure.
It may be argued that the assumption that murder, adultery, etc., are offences against God's will is a mere assumption, and that in making the assumption we are fleeing "to the bosom of faith." The reply is that we are content not merely to flee but to rest there . . . 211-238
If we are to understand the place of Christianity in the evolution of religion, we must consider the place of religion in the evolution of humanity; and I must explain the point of view from which I propose to approach the three ideas of (1) evolution, (2) the evolution of humanity, (3) the evolution of religion.
I wish to approach the idea of evolution from the proposition that the individual is both a means by which society attains its end, and an end for the sake of which society exists. Utilitarianism has familiarised us with the view that society exists for the sake of the individual and for the purpose of realising the happiness and good of every individual: no man is to be treated merely as a chattel, existing solely as a means whereby his owner, or the governing class, may benefit. But this aspect of the facts is entirely ignored by the scientific theory of evolution: according to that theory, the individual exists only as a factor in the process of evolution, as one of the means by which, and not as in any sense the end for which, the process is carried on.