CHAPTER X
SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF RELIGION
[1014]. Religion is social because man is a social animal. This does not exclude individual religion—in fact religion must have begun with individuals, as is the case with all social movements. Morality, indeed, understood as a system of conduct among human beings, could not exist except in a society which included at least two persons; but if we could imagine a quite isolated rational being, he might be religious if, as is perfectly possible, he conceived himself as standing in relation with some supernatural being or beings. This question, however, is not a practical one—there is no evidence of such isolation, and no probability that there ever has been a time when man was not social.
[1015]. It is generally agreed that men lived at first in small detached groups, gradually forming tribes and nations, and finally effecting a social fusion of nations. Religious worship has followed these changes. Religion is simply one line of social growth existing along with others, science, philosophy, art; all these, as is remarked above,[1830] go on together, each influencing and influenced by the others. Human life has always been unitary—no one part can be severed from the others; it is a serious error, impairing the accuracy of the conception of religion, to regard it as something apart from the rest of human life.
[1016]. The external history of religion, then, is the history of social growth in the line of religious organization; that is, it has been determined by religious outward needs in accordance with the growth of ideas. In the consideration of this history we have to note a growth in ritual, in devotional practices, and in the organization of religious usages, first in tribal or national communities and then in religious communities transcending national and racial boundaries.
External Worship
[1017]. We assume a human society recognizing some supernatural or extrahuman object or force that is regarded as powerful and as standing in some sort of effective relation with human life. It is possible that societies exist that do not recognize any such object or force or, recognizing them, do not employ any means of entering into relation with them. Such cases, if they exist (and their existence has not been fully established), we may pass by with the remark that the absence of worship need be taken to show only that ritual has been a slow growth.
Our information regarding the least-developed communities indicates that with them religion, when it exists, is an affair of custom, of tradition and usage, handed down during a period the history of which we have no means of knowing. Worship as it first appears consists of ceremonies, generally, perhaps always, regarded as having objective effectiveness.[1831] The ritual act itself, in the earliest systems, is powerful, in a sort magical, but tends to lose this character and take on the forms of ordinary human intercourse.