I do not pretend to know how the lowest savages evolved the theory of a God who reads the heart and ‘makes for righteousness,’ It is as easy, almost, for me to believe that they ‘were not left without a witness,’ as to believe that this God of theirs was evolved out of the maleficent ghost of a dirty mischievous medicine-man.

Here one may repeat that while the ‘quaint or majestic foreshadowings’ of a Supreme Being, among very low savages, are only sketched lightly by Mr. Tylor; in Mr. Herbert Spencer’s system they seem to be almost omitted.  In his ‘Principles of Sociology’ and ’Ecclesiastical Institutions’ one looks in vain for an adequate notice; in vain for almost any notice, of this part of his topic.  The watcher of conduct, the friendly, creative being of low savage faith, whence was he evolved?  The circumstance of his existence, as far as I can see; the chastity, the unselfishness, the pitifulness, the loyalty to plighted word, the prohibition of even extra-tribal homicide, enjoined in various places on his worshippers, are problems that appear somehow to have escaped Mr. Spencer’s notice.  We are puzzled by endless difficulties in his system:  for example as to how savages can forget their great-grandfathers’ very names, and yet remember ’traditional persons from generation to generation,’ so that ’in time any amount of expansion and idealisation can be reached,’[19]

Again, Mr. Spencer will argue that it is a strange thing if ’primitive men had, as some think, the consciousness of a Universal Power whence they and all other things proceeded,’ and yet ’spontaneously performed to that Power an act like that performed by them to the dead body of a fellow savage’—­by offerings of food.[20]

Now, first, there would be nothing strange in the matter if the crude idea of ‘Universal Power’ came earliest, and was superseded, in part, by a later propitiation of the dead and ghosts.  The new religious idea would soon refract back on, and influence by its ritual, the older conception.  And, secondly, it is precisely this ‘Universal Power’ that is not propitiated by offerings of food, in Tonga, (despite Mr. Huxley) Australia, and Africa, for example.  We cannot escape the difficulty by saying that there the old ghost of Universal Power is regarded as dead, decrepit, or as a roi-faineant not worth propitiating, for that is not true of the punisher of sin, the teacher of generosity, and the solitary sanction of faith between men and peoples.

It would appear then, on the whole, that the question of the plain man to the anthropologist, ’Having got your idea of spirit into the savage’s mind, how does he develop out of it what I call God?’ has not been answered.  God cannot be a reflection from human kings where there have been no kings; nor a president elected out of a polytheistic society of gods where there is as yet no polytheism; nor an ideal first ancestor where men do not worship their ancestors; while, again, the spirit of a man who died, real or ideal, does not answer to a common savage conception of the Creator.  All this will become much more obvious as we study in detail the highest gods of the lowest races.