He is almost too revered to be named (except in mythology) and is not to be represented by idols.  He is not moved by sacrifice; he has not the chance; like Death in Greece, ’he only, of all Gods, loves not gifts.’  Thus the status of theology does not correspond to what we look for in very low culture.  It would scarcely be a paradox to say that the popular Zeus, or Ares, is degenerate from Mungan-ngaur, or the Fuegian being who forbids the slaying of an enemy, and almost literally ‘marks the sparrow’s fall.’

If we knew all the mythology of Darumulun, we should probably find it (like much of the myth of Pundjel or Bunjil) on a very different level from the theology.  There are two currents, the religious and the mythical, flowing together through religion.  The former current, religious, even among very low savages, is pure from the magical ghost-propitiating habit.  The latter current, mythological, is full of magic, mummery, and scandalous legend.  Sometimes the latter stream quite pollutes the former, sometimes they flow side by side, perfectly distinguishable, as in Aztec ethical piety, compared with the bloody Aztec ritualism.  Anthropology has mainly kept her eyes fixed on the impure stream, the lusts, mummeries, conjurings, and frauds of priesthoods, while relatively, or altogether, neglecting (as we have shown) what is honest and of good report.

The worse side of religion is the less sacred, and therefore the more conspicuous.  Both elements are found co-existing, in almost all races, and nobody, in our total lack of historical information about the beginnings, can say which, if either, element is the earlier, or which, if either, is derived from the other.  To suppose that propitiation of corpses and then of ghosts came first is agreeable, and seems logical, to some writers who are not without a bias against all religion as an unscientific superstition.  But we know so little!  The first missionaries in Greenland supposed that there was not, there, a trace of belief in a Divine Being.  ’But when they came to understand their language better, they found quite the reverse to be true ... and not only so, but they could plainly gather from a free dialogue they had with some perfectly wild Greenlanders (at that time avoiding any direct application to their hearts) that their ancestors must have believed in a Supreme Being, and did render him some service, which their posterity neglected little by little...’[21] Mr. Tylor does not refer to this as a trace of Christian Scandinavian influence on the Eskimo.[22]

That line, of course, may be taken.  But an Eskimo said to a missionary, ‘Thou must not imagine that no Greenlander thinks about these things’ (theology).  He then stated the argument from design.  ’Certainly there must be some Being who made all these things.  He must be very good too...  Ah, did I but know him, how I would love and honour him.’  As St. Paul writes:  ’That which may be known of God is manifest in them, for