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LECTURE IV.
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chrysalis stage: half material and half spiritual, and rising and falling in its character according to the varying capacities of speakers and hearers. Here is a constant source of misunderstandings, many of which have maintained their place in the religion and in the mythology of the ancient world. There are two distinct tendencies to be observed in the growth of ancient religion. There is, on the one side, the struggle of the mind against the material character of language, a constant attempt to strip words of their coarse covering, and fit them, by main force, for the purposes of abstract thought. But there is, on the other side, a constant relapse from the spiritual into the material, and, strange to say, a predilection for the material sense instead of the spiritual. This action and reaction has been going on in the language of religion from the earliest times, and it is at work even now.
It seems at first a fatal element in religion that it cannot escape from this flux and reflux of human thought, which is repeated at least once in every generation between father and son, between mother and daughter; but if we watch it more closely we shall find, I think, that this flux and reflux constitutes the very life of religion.
Place yourselves in the position of those who first are said to have worshipped the sky. We say that they worshipped the sky, or that the sky was their god; and in one sense this is true, but in a sense very different from that which is usually attached to such statements. If we use 'god' in the sense which it has now, then to say that the sky was their god is to say what is simply impossible. Such a word as God, in the sense in which we use it-such a word even
