Beyond all doubt, savages who find themselves under the watchful eye of a moral deity whom they cannot ‘square’ will desert him as soon as they have evolved a practicable ghost-god, useful for family purposes, whom they can square.  No less manifestly, savages, who already possess a throng of serviceable ghost-gods, will not enthusiastically evolve a moral Being who despises gifts, and only cares for obedience.  ’There is a great deal of human nature in man,’ and, if Mr. Im Thurn’s description of the Guianese be correct, everything we know of human nature, and of evolution, assures us that the Father, or Maker, or Ancient of Days came first; the ghost-gods, last.  What has here been said about the Indians of Guiana (namely, that they are now more ghost and spirit worshippers, with only a name surviving to attest a knowledge of a Father and Maker in Heaven) applies equally well to the Zulus.  The Zulus are the great standing type of an animistic or ghost-worshipping race without a God.  But, had they a God (on the Australian pattern) whom they have forgotten, or have they not yet evolved a God out of Animism?

The evidence, collected by Dr. Callaway, is honest, but confused.  One native, among others, put forward the very theory here proposed by us as an alternative to that of Mr. Im Thurn.  ‘Unkulunkulu’ (the idealised but despised First Ancestor) ’was not worshipped [by men].  For it is not worship when people see things, as rain, or food, or corn, and say, “Yes, these things were made by Unkulunkulu....  Afterwards they [men] had power to change those things, that they might become the Amatongos” [might belong to the ancestral spirits]. They took them away from Unkulunkulu.’[34]

Animism supplanted Theism.  Nothing could be more explicit.  But, though we have found an authentic Zulu text to suit our provisional theory, the most eminent philosophical example must not reduce us into supposing that this text settles the question.  Dr. Callaway collected great masses of Zulu answers to his inquiries, and it is plain that a respondent, like the native theologian whom we have cited, may have adapted his reply to what he had learned of Christian doctrine.  Having now the Christian notion of a Divine Creator, and knowing, too, that the unworshipped Unkulunkulu is said to have ‘made things,’ while only ancestral spirits, are worshipped, the native may have inferred that worship (by Christians given to the Creator) was at some time transferred by the Zulus from Unkulunkulu to the Amatongo.  The truth is that both the anthropological theory (spirits first, Gods last), and our theory (Supreme Being first, spirits next) can find warrant in Dr. Callaway’s valuable collections.  For that reason, the problem must be solved after a survey of the whole field of savage and barbaric religion; it cannot be settled by the ambiguous case of the Zulus alone.