At the creation of the race there was thrown around it such safeguards
as should tend to its continuance. These were, of course, implanted in
the crude mentality of undeveloped man. Underlying all the rest and
the most important to its perpetuation was fear. The ignorant child
has no fear of consequences attendant upon any action; experience
teaches him to know what they are, and how to protect himself from
them. This was the first lesson of primitive man, and when, through
the exercise of his inventive faculties, he had mastered his visible
foes, the animal monsters surrounding him and threatening his life, and
he found himself confronted by the action of terrible forces which he
could not grasp or see, he, by analogy, endowed them with personality,
and such attributes as he knew himself to be possessed of, adding
thereto powers and possibilities which were limited only by his own
imagination. This was the very beginning of the working of the mental
in him, and while it was most grotesque and unreasoning, it yet drew a
sharp line between the mere animal and the animal man, and his whole
life being spent in conflict with his foes, he naturally carried
forward his growing perceptions of the existence of supernatural powers
which were influencing his life upon the same basis, i. e., of an
unending warfare, wherein he must always be the one attacked and
vanquished. Fear of the animal world developed into a shivering terror
of the invisible, and so deep and lasting was this first impression of
the spiritual world upon his crude faculties, that it was made an
universal heredity among all races and peoples. It exists everywhere
today, even among those who profess to be living in the light of a
higher revelation of God's purpose in the life of man.