9. Epicurus, Lucretius, and Hume have traced religion to fear.
10. Fear explains atheism better than it explains religion, and in order even to be feared God must be believed in.
Men fear a great many things. Mere fear founds nothing, but only causes efforts to avoid the presence or thought of its object. Fear enters into religion, and is filial in the higher, and servile in the lower, forms of religion.
11. Feuerbach resolves religion into desire—into an ignorant and illusive personification of man's own nature as he would wish it to be.
12. This view presupposes the truth of atheism, does not explain why man should refer to supramundane ends or objects, and is contradicted by the historical facts, which show that reason and conscience have at least co-operated with desire in the origination and development of religion.
13. Schleiermacher resolves religion into a feeling of absolute dependence—of pure and complete passiveness.
Statement of his theory. Shown to rest on a pantheistic conception of the Divine Being. His reduction of the Divine attributes into power.
14. No such feeling can exist, the mind being incapable of experiencing a feeling of nothingness—a consciousness of unconsciousness.
15. Could it be supposed to exist, it would have no religious character, because wholly blind and irrational.
16. The theory of Schleiermacher makes the moral and religious consciousness subversive of each other, the former affirming and the latter denying our freedom and responsibility.