How do earlier religious systems influence later ones?

[Joseph Gill]

Would you agree with the following quote:

"No positive religion that has moved man has been able to start with a tabula rasa, and express itself as if religion were beginning for the first time, in form, if not in substance. The new system must be in contact all along the line with the older ideas and practices which it finds in possession. A new scheme of faith can find a hearing only by appealing to religious instincts and susceptibilities that already exist; and it cannot reach these without taking account of the traditional forms in which all religious feeling is embodied, and without speaking a language which men accustomed to these old forms can understand."

- Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites