Mr. Thomson has clearly no bias in favour of a God like our own, known to savages, and not derived from ghost-worship.  He deduces this god, Tui Laga, from priestly reflection and speculation.  But we find such a God where we find no priests, where a priesthood has not been developed.  Such a God, being usually unpropitiated by sacrifice and lucrative private practice, is precisely the kind of deity who does not suit a priesthood.  For these reasons—­that a priesthood ‘sees no money in’ a God of this kind, and that Gods of this kind, ethical and creative, are found where there are no priesthoods—­we cannot look on the conception as a late one of priestly origin, as Mr. Thomson does, though a learned caste, like the Peruvian Amantas, may refine on the idea.  Least of all can such a God be ‘the creation of the priests that minister to him,’ when, as in Peru, the Andaman Isles, and much of Africa, this God is ministered to by no priests.  Nor, lastly, can we regard the absence of sacrifice to the Creative Being as a mere proof that he is an ancestral ghost who ’had lived on earth at too remote a time;’ for this absence of sacrifice occurs where ghosts are dreaded, but are not propitiated by offerings of food (as among Australians, Andamanese, and Blackfoot Indians), while the Creative Being is not and never was a ghost, according to his worshippers.

At this point criticism may naturally remark that whether the savage Supreme Being is feted, as by the Comanches, who offer puffs of smoke:  or is apparently half forgotten, as by the Algonquins and Zulus:  whether he is propitiated by sacrifice (which is very rare indeed), or only by conduct, I equally claim him as the probable descendant in evolution of the primitive, undifferentiated, not necessarily ‘spiritual’ Being of such creeds as the Australian.

One must reply that this pedigree cannot, indeed, be historically traced, but that it presents none of the logical difficulties inherent in the animistic pedigree—­namely, that the savage Supreme Being is the last and highest result of evolution on animistic lines out of ghosts.  It does not run counter to the evidence universally offered by savages, that their Supreme Being never was mortal man.  It is consistent, whereas the animistic hypothesis is, in this case, inconsistent, with the universal savage theory of Death.  Finally, as has been said before, granting my opinion that there are two streams of religious thought, one rising in the conception of an undifferentiated Being, eternal, moral, and creative, the other rising in the ghost-doctrine, it stands to reason that the latter, as best adapted to everyday needs and experiences, normal and supernormal, may contaminate the former, and introduce sacrifice and food-propitiation into the ritual of Beings who, by the original conception, ’need nothing of ours.’  At the same time, the conception of ‘spirit,’ once attained, would inevitably come to be attached to the idea of the Supreme Being,