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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: COMPARATIVE VIEW OF RELIGIONS. INTRODUCTION. The conception of religion presupposes, a, God as object; b, man as subject; c, the mutual relation existing between them. According to the various stages of development which men have reached, religious belief manifests itself either in the form of a passive feeling of dependence, where the subject, not yet conscious of his independence, feels himself wholly overmastered by the deity, or the object of worship, as by a power outside of and opposed to himself; or, whenthe feeling of independence has awakened, in a one-sided elevation of the human, whereby man in worshiping a deity deifies himself. In the highest stage of religious development, the most entire feeling of dependence is united in religion with the strongest consciousness of personal independence. The first of these forms is exhibited in the fetich and nature-worship of the ancient nations ; the second in Buddhism, and in the deification of the human, which reaches its full height among the Greeks. The true religion, prepared in Israel, is the Christian, in which man, grown conscious of his oneness with God, is ruled by the divine as an inner power of life, and acts spontaneously and freely while in the fullest dependence upon God. Since Christ, no more perfect religion has appeared. What is true and good in Islamism was borrowed from Israel and Christianity. Translated from the Dutch of Prof. J. H. Scholten, by F. T. Wash- burn. This constitutes the first part of Prof. Scholten's History of Religion and Philosophy. (Geschiedenis der Godsdienst en Wijsbegetrte.) Third edition. Leyden, 1863. Of this work there is a translation in French by M. Albert Rdville (Paris, 1861); but this translation, which was made from an earlier edition, is very defective in the first...