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"This book may be described as an attempt to do two things; first, to explain religion through nature and man; and, secondly, to construe Christianity through religion. The author conceives religion to be a joint product of the mind within man and the nature around him, the mind being the source of the ideas which constitute its soul, the nature around determining the usages and customs which build up its body. He does not think, therefore, that any one of its special forms can be explained without the local nature which begot and shaped it, or that its general being can be resolved and construed without the reason or thought which is common to the race. He sees in religion the greatest of all man's unconscious creations, and the most potent of the means which the past, while it was still a living present, formed for the making of the man and the times that were yet to be." -- From the Preface