Some of you will know that by day I work for the test prep company, The Princeton Review. It recently came to my attention that in the 19th Century, there was an unrelated journal with the same name. I managed to find an 1881 compilation of articles on eBay, and I'll be sharing excerpts now and then, chosen via stichomancy.

This week's passage comes from Dr. M. Stuart Phelps' July 1881 article entitled Anthropomorphism:

Setting aside the crude materialism which has no place in the discussion of the evolution of the concept of God, the agnostic can show us no primitive religion in which there was not the worship of a Being supposed to be capable of apprehending that worship. As the formulated concept of abstract space comes to the child only after years of patient study, so may the formulated concept of an infinite, intelligent, personal God have come only at a comparatively late stage in the education of the race. But the thing itself was in the human heart from the outset. Embedded in ignorance, overgrown by superstition, distorted by all the puerilities of heathen fancy, this faith in the intelligence of deity was still the invariable logical antecedent of every act of worship and of prayer. That worship and that prayer presupposed the receptivity of God, and that receptivity could only be the act of an intelligent will-power.

It was written in the 1800s, so it must be true!