Nature was at first regarded as a realm in which personal agency ruled. Yahweh thundered from Sinai and rode in the tempest. Apollo guided the horses of the sun. The gods did things in nature directly, much as man does them, only they are able to do things that man cannot do. By will and word of command, they make the mountains tremble and the hills to shake. But gradually man came to conceive nature as a self-contained realm in which parts affected one another. We owe the beginning of this view to the Greeks. They developed, from the first, a way of approach to events which was absolutely opposed to the older outlook. As nature became, for man, more and more self-sufficient and capable of explaining what occurred within it, there was less need to appeal to an agent of the old mythical sort.
Religion is rightly anthropomorphic, just as ethics is. Man's welfare and destiny are properly and inevitably the important questions for man, and he naturally approached the world with these problems in mind. He used personal and social categories in his vague thinking about his environment. The discovery that nature { 121} did not work that way was made slowly and only after comparative civilization had brought leisure and safety. Even to-day, the intellectual restraint, which the application of impersonal and non-moral concepts to nature demands, is distasteful to the majority. But this restraint will become less and less as man is introduced from childhood to a world of law and order to which he can adapt himself with a fair measure of success. His eyes will remove themselves from far horizons and turn to the world around him, nor will he dream of a transcendent realm of which earthly things are only the appearance and veil. He will seek his welfare and find his destiny among his fellows during the normal time allotted to his species. Banded with them, he will become an active and clear-eyed worker for the four great blessings which, he finds, are within his grasp, health, knowledge, goodness and beauty. Many virtues and ideals which religion has sheltered and encouraged will find themselves at home in this valiant and intelligent world, but the religion of the past must shed many things before it will feel in harmony with its new setting. Will sufficient identity remain to make the term still significant? Frankly, it is very hard to say--impossible to say with certainty.