The social structure in which the predatory habit has been the dominant factor in the shaping of institutions is a structure based on status.

The pervading norm in the predatory community's scheme of life is the relation of superior and inferior, noble and base, dominant and subservient persons and classes, master and slave.

The anthropomorphic cults have come down from that stage of industrial development and have been shaped by the same scheme of economic differentiation--a differentiation into consumer and producer--and they are pervaded by the same dominant principle of mastery and subservience.

The cults impute to their divinity the habits of thought answering to the stage of economic differentiation at which the cults took shape.

The anthropomorphic divinity is conceived to be punctilious in all questions of precedence and is prone to an assertion of mastery and an arbitrary exercise of power--an habitual resort to force as the final arbiter.
In the later and maturer formulations of the anthropomorphic creed this imputed habit of dominance on the part of a divinity of awful presence and inscrutable power is chastened into "the fatherhood of God." The spiritual attitude and the aptitudes imputed to the preternatural agent are still such as belong under the regime of status, but they now assume the patriarchal cast characteristic of the quasi-peaceable stage of culture.