than the idolatrous and polytheistic peoples about them.  May not the contrast between the Patriarchs and the Pharaohs, David and the Philistines, the Persians and the Babylonians, mark a law of history of wider application than we are wont to suspect?  But if so, what was the parent of idolatry?  For a natural genesis it must have had, whether it be a healthy and necessary development of the human mind—­as some hold, not without weighty arguments on their side; or whether it be a diseased and merely fungoid growth, as I believe it to be.  I cannot hold that it originated in Nature-worship, simply because I can find no evidence of such an origin.  There is rather evidence, if the statements of the idolaters themselves are to be taken, that it originated in the worship of superior races by inferior races; possibly also in the worship of works of art which those races, dying out, had left behind them, and which the lower race, while unable to copy them, believed to be possessed of magical powers derived from a civilisation which they had lost.  After a while the priesthood, which has usually, in all ages and countries, proclaimed itself the depository of a knowledge and a civilisation lost to the mass of the people, may have gained courage to imitate these old works of art, with proper improvements for the worse, and have persuaded the people that the new idols would do as well as the old ones.  Would that some truly learned man would ’let his thoughts play freely’ round this view of the mystery, and see what can be made out of it.  But whatever is made out, on either view, it will still remain a mystery—­to me at least, as much as to Isaiah of old--how this utterly abnormal and astonishing animal called man first got into his foolish head that he could cut a thing out of wood or stone which would listen to him and answer his prayers.  Yet so it is; so it has been for unnumbered ages.  Man may be defined as a speaking animal, or a cooking animal.  He is best, I fear, defined as an idolatrous animal; and so much the worse for him.  But what if that very fact, diseased as it is, should be a sure proof that he is more than an animal?

CHAPTER XV:  THE RACES—­A LETTER

Dear —–­, I have been to the races:  not to bet, nor to see the horses run:  not even to see the fair ladies on the Grand Stand, in all the newest fashions of Paris via New York:  but to wander en mufti among the crowd outside, and behold the humours of men.  And I must say that their humours were very good humours; far better, it seemed to me, than those of an English race-ground.  Not that I have set foot on one for thirty years; but at railway stations, and elsewhere, one cannot help seeing what manner of folk, beside mere holiday folk, rich or poor, affect English races; or help pronouncing them, if physiognomy be any test of character, the most degraded beings, even some of those smart-dressed