In the light of ancient history and the result of recent excavations it
is possible, now as never before, to study the varied influences and
forces employed by God in the past to open the spiritual eyes of mankind
to see him and his truth. The geological evidence suggests that man, as
man, has lived on this earth, fifty, perhaps one hundred thousand years.
Anthropology, going farther back than history or primitive tradition,
traces the slow and painful stages by which early man learned his first
lessons in civilization and religion. From the beginning, man's
instincts as a religious being have asserted themselves, crude though
their expression was. The oldest mounds of Babylonia and Egypt contain
ruins of ancient temples, altars, and abundant evidence of the religious
zeal of the peoples who once inhabited these lauds. The earliest
examples of human literature thus far discovered are largely religious
in theme and spirit.

[Sidenote: _Primitive unfolding of the innate religious instinct_]

All these testify that early man believed in a power or powers outside
himself, and that his chief passion was to know and do the will of his
god or gods. Jesus himself bore witness in the opening words of the
prayer which he taught his disciples, that this is the essence of
religion. It was natural and inevitable that primitive man, with his
naive view of the universe, should believe not in one but in many forces
or spirits, and that he should first enthrone the physical above the
ethical and spiritual. It is the instinctive tendency of the child
to-day. The later identification of the divine powers with the sun, that
gave light and fertility to the soil, or with the moon, that guided the
caravans by night over the arid deserts, or with the other heavenly
bodies, that moved in majestic array across the midnight sky, was
likewise a natural step in the evolution of primitive belief.