Then there is a third element, which is found in the lowest as well as in the highest religion. Not only is this power an object of worship, but also religion involves a confirmation of the life to what is believed to be the will of the divine being. Thus religion is a life, as well as a creed and a ritual. It has been widely questioned the connection of religion and morality, and the facts tend to usually show that religion (within at least the religious community) in all forms inevitably comes with it an influence upon the whole conduct of those who believe in it.
To remove from religion all beliefs; and then to identify it with -pure feeling, is to destroy its fundamental character as rational. Without say the belief in friendly spirits, for example, there can be no religion corresponding to the stage of animism, and such a belief constitutes the theology of this primitive stage of intelligence. Nor does it introduce any fundamental difference that the beliefs lying at the basis of religion are taken hold of by the reflective intellect, and formed into a more or less consistent system. If it was to be said that religion cannot exist without belief, well then neither can it be identified with the forms in which reverence for the divine expresses itself. Whatever may be said of the necessity of ceremony and ritual, it will not be denied that religion does not consist in ceremony and ritual, since a man who has no belief in the divine, and therefore no reverence for it, may perform the so called religious act of worship, and yet be essentially irreligious. Religion, in fact, is incompatible with the elimination of any of the elements that have been mentioned. A religion without belief in the divine is a superstition; a religion that has no influence upon conduct is a contradiction in terms; a religion that substitutes external ceremonial acts for the higher life is an empty formalism.