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Excerpt from The Pedagogy of Missions As to the origin of religion many different views have been and are still held. Hume thought that hope and fear lay at its basis. Man was afraid of natural forces, and that caused him to predicate gods back of them. Efforts were then made to secure the good-will of these deities. Edward B. Tylor thought that animism was at the beginning of all religions, attributing to all objects a life similar to that which man was conscious of having within himself. He thought that all forms of culture and worship could be derived from this primitive religion. Herbert Spencer traces religion to ancestor worship. The deities of primitive men are the spirits of their ancestors, which after death inhabit trees, stones and other objects. This presses the origin back of the animism of Tyler and the fear and hope origin of Hume. But the real source of religion is farther back yet and deeper in the scul of man. Animism and ancestor worship belong to a later stratum of human history. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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