That sentence is an accurate and exhaustive summary of what Mr. Wells has to tell us on the origin of religion. It is exactly that. It is “incorrect science based on guesswork or false analogy.”
I have said that the origin of all the errors which he copies from his predecessors of half a lifetime ago is the neglect of the obvious fact that Man is a fixed type. It is the point I so emphasized in my last chapter, because it is capital to the whole discussion.
If you pretend, or try to believe, that Man alone, out of all creation, is not a definable being, but in a ceaseless process of rapid change, then, of course, you can invent at will any mythology to account for anything you prefer to hope happened to him in the past. You can imagine any monstrous lack of human faculty in the past so as to make your facts fit in with your theory. But if you regard Man as Man, since the time when first True Man (Mr. Wells’s own term) appeared upon earth; if you regard palæolithic man as Man, a known animal, just as you regard the palæolithic reindeer as a reindeer; if you consider a known thing called “Man” and not a succession of imaginary beings made up as you go along, then you have three certain guides to go upon, to wit: (1) your own knowledge of your own self, (2) your knowledge of your fellow-beings, (3) the record of Man’s actions and being since he has kept records.
Let us first see what are the accompaniments of religion in the human mind, and how they tend to work in the fallen nature of man.
What is the known way in which the human mind proceeds in its religious activities?
Those activities are all connected together by being each of them dependent on the original Idea of God.
If God be, then these religious practices—sacrifices, sacraments, prayers, awe, the sanctity of special deeds, places, and things, restrictions, rituals, Fas et nefas—are more or less consonant to that Supreme Reality. However perverted, each religious action will, if there be indeed a Creator and Sustainer, correspond to and resemble what might have been an unperverted action of the same kind; and that unperverted religious action would be an action in exact tune with reality. The perverted Sacrament argues a true Sacrament; the perverted Sacrifice a true form of Sacrifice, and in general the perverted Worship a true Worship.
If God be not, then Sacrifice, Sacrament, Prayer, Inhibition, Ritual, are even worse perversions than the original illusion of a God from which they all derive.
These main religious functions I have just put down by their popular names. Let me give them a more exact order. They are, first of all, Veneration; next, the offerings of gratitude and propitiation, that is Sacrifice; next, the Communion of the Human Spirit with God, that is Prayer; next, a recognition of Being, spiritual and incorporeal, which involves the possibility of man’s surviving death; next, Ritual—the necessary human framework of any continuous human Veneration, Sacrifice, Prayer, or affirmation of Immortality.
The Veneration natural to That which made us and by which we are, That which overshadows all possible things (including ourselves), produces a multitude of results: love quite as much as fear or wonder; a vast curiosity and search; and, above all, the ineradicable desire to worship—that is, to put up monuments (within the limits of our powers) bearing testimony to our Veneration; to perform acts consonant with that Veneration; to ask for aid, to admit wrongdoing, to expect justice in social relations, to enforce it, and so forth.