For him the only fact that matters is that, whereas some things in the world are ordinary, and can be reckoned on, other things cannot be reckoned on, but are wonder-working.
Moreover, of wonder-working things, some are good and some are bad.
To get all the good kind of wonder-workers on to his side, so as to confound the bad kind--that is what his religion is there to do for him.

"May blessings come, may mischiefs go!" is the import of his religious striving, whether anthropologists class it as spell or as prayer.
Now the function of religion, it has been assumed, is to restore confidence, when man is mazed, and out of his depth, fearful of the mysteries that obtrude on his life, yet compelled, if not exactly wishful, to face them and wrest from them whatever help is in them.
This function religion fulfils by what may be described in one word as "suggestion." How the suggestion works psychologically--how, for instance, association of ideas, the so-called "sympathetic magic," predominates at the lower levels of religious experience--is a difficult and technical question which cannot be discussed here.
Religion stands by when there is something to be done, and suggests that it can be done well and successfully; nay, that it is being so done.

And, when the religion is of the effective sort, the believers respond to the suggestion, and put the thing through.

As the Latin poet says, "they can because they think they can." What, from the anthropological point of view, is the effective sort of religion, the sort that survives because, on the whole, those whom it helps survive?
It is dangerous to make sweeping generalizations, but there is at any rate a good deal to be said for classing the world's religions either as mechanical and ineffective, or as spiritual and effective.

The mechanical kind offers its consolations in the shape of a set of implements.