12. All the religions of the world were necessarily, at their origin, in harmony with the degree of moral and intellectual advancement of the peoples among whom they emerged, and who, — being still too deeply sunk in materiality to conceive of things purely spiritual — made the greater part of their religious duties to consist in the accomplishment of certain external forms. For a time, forms suffice to satisfy the mind; at a later period, when human beings acquire more light, they feel the emptiness of those forms, and, if the doctrines of their faith do not suffice to supply the void left by the collapse of its forms, they abandon their religion and become philosophers.
