of those far-off worshipers there were beliefs and feelings which we now regard as superstitious. While we study the history of the Hebrews we are also slowly learning that God has never leftHimself without a witness, but that through all men and by all faiths, He has been coming more and more into communion with the race. Any real faith in a real God must teach that all men are cared for by Him, all men share His life, and all men according to the measure of their need and their capacity receive His revelations. With respect to these problems one of the most illuminating questions to ask is "Was man active or passive in the making of religion?" This question is perhaps the most divisive that can be asked. It seems to separate men into naturalists and supernaturalists. The believer in the supernatural is wont to say that all the knowledge and worship in religion come as a direct gift from an active God to a passive man. The naturalist, on the other hand, would have us believe that the making of religion was done by an active man working largely upon material in his own heart and brain, and that God was either absent or passive in the performance. It does not seem necessary to have these two camps divide religious men in modern times. The revelation of the thought and life of God could never rise above the knowledge and capacity of the man to whom it was revealed. This man, yearning with longing and hopes too great for speech, was sure to make many and many a mistake. He would often misunderstand even the voice of God Himself. "Thus saith the Lord" cannot always be trusted. Nevertheless through the travail of the generations men were active in coöperation with all their environment, physical and psychical, seeking to understand and to interpret. His reverence made man great. CHAPTER II SCIENCE OF SOCIOLOGY THE modern science of sociology has furnished a method of interpretation for nearly every field of scientific inquiry. If it has not yet furnished itself with principles and methods of great definiteness, it has done more. It has furnished a point of view for the study of human activity of peculiar significance. History, economics, politics, and all human sciences have been brought into relation with each other to such an extent that the boundaries of each have become uncertain and a nobler unity of knowledge seems emergent. For the purposes of this study it is necessary to define sociology in order to indicate the nature and scope of the science. This is the more necessary because the word has been used as the title of all kinds of theories and as the object of numerous reform programs. But it is a science and so deals with facts and their interpretation. It demands the inductive method. As the science of society it finds its social facts related to space and gives rise to social geography. It finds them in relation to time and hence there is a history of society. But it is not the isolated fact that is the object of interest. It is the social fact as one of a series. Acts tend to group themselves. Given a certain degree of development in the state, and correspondences are found in the form of the family and in the quality of religious institutions. Societies are not made, they grow. Society exhibits certain organs or institutions through which it does its work and expresses its life. Similarity of social organs does not mean that the two groups in comparison necessarily have a common origin or that one group has borrowed from the other. These social resemblances mark a much profounder law, namely, that societies at similar stages of development, under similar conditions, manifest similar characteristics. The form of the family, that is, whether the home shelters one wife or several, is not based upon what we moderns call moral grounds so much as it is upon the supply of food products and the economic and political organization of the group. Nor does this statement mean that ethical motives are not universal and profoundly significant. Sociology may be defined as a study of the agents, processes, results, and tendencies of social development. The active agents are human beings, and a study of them as related to the history of any form of society is much more than the taking of a census to find their numbers or the studying of their race in order to ascertain their quality, though these facts are each important. A social group must be distinguished from the forms of social institutions through which it works. It is a body of people, large or small, with common social interests, who live and work together. The size of the group will depend upon the fertility of the soil, the extent of the territory, but most of all upon the degree of culture. Abundance of food is necessary to any civilization. Surplus food makes the artisan, the merchant, and the artist possible, but cultural development is necessary to provide social organs at once sufficiently complex and sufficiently elastic to meet the needs of rich and varied forms of living. It is agreed by students of the question that low-grade people can only live in small groups, no matter what their other advantages. The organization of the group must increase in definiteness as it increases in size. The clan may have a small organization, but the tribe is more than a group of clans. Each clan in the tribe may maintain its own special organization, but all the clans in the tribe must unite in a common life and organization, or there is no tribe. A tribe may get along with a ritual of life ordered by inherited cus need t Soauty |