The coolie temples are curious places to those who have never before been face to face with real heathendom.  Their mark is, generally, a long bamboo with a pennon atop, outside a low dark hut, with a broad flat verandah, or rather shed, outside the door.  Under the latter, opposite each door, if I recollect rightly, is a stone or small stump, on which offerings are made of red dust and flowers.  From it the worshippers can see the images within.  The white man, stooping, enters the temple.  The attendant priest, so far from forbidding him, seems highly honoured, especially if the visitor give him a shilling; and points out, in the darkness—­for there is no light save through the low doors—­three or four squatting abominations, usually gilded.  Sometimes these have been carved in the island.  Sometimes the poor folk have taken the trouble to bring them all the way from India on board ship.  Hung beside them on the walls are little pictures, often very well executed in the miniature-like Hindoo style by native artists in the island.  Large brass pots, which have some sacred meaning, stand about, and with them a curious trident-shaped stand, about four feet high, on the horns of which garlands of flowers are hung as offerings.  The visitor is told that the male figures are Mahadeva, and the female Kali:  we could hear of no other deities.  I leave it to those who know Indian mythology better than I do, to interpret the meaning—­or rather the past meaning, for I suspect it means very little now—­of all this trumpery and nonsense, on which the poor folk seem to spend much money.  It was impossible, of course, even if one had understood their language, to find out what notions they attached to it all; and all I could do, on looking at these heathen idol chapels, in the midst of a Christian and civilised land, was to ponder, in sadness and astonishment, over a puzzle as yet to me inexplicable; namely, how human beings first got into their heads the vagary of worshipping images.  I fully allow the cleverness and apparent reasonableness of M. Comte’s now famous theory of the development of religions.  I blame no one for holding it.  But I cannot agree with it.  The more of a ‘saine appreciation,’ as M. Comte calls it, I bring to bear on the known facts; the more I ’let my thought play freely around them,’ the more it is inconceivable to me, according to any laws of the human intellect which I have seen at work, that savage or half-savage folk should have invented idolatries.  I do not believe that Fetishism is the parent of idolatry; but rather—­as I have said elsewhere—­that it is the dregs and remnants of idolatry.  The idolatrous nations now, as always, are not the savage nations; but those who profess a very ancient and decaying civilisation.  The Hebrew Scriptures uniformly represent the non-idolatrous and monotheistic peoples, from Abraham to Cyrus, as lower in what we now call the scale of civilisation,