It was found difficult, or impossible, to induce Christian converts, in Polynesia, to repeat the old prayers.  They began, trembled, and abstained.  They had a ritual ‘for almost every act of their lives,’ a thing unfamiliar to low savages.  In fact, beyond all doubt, religious criminal acts, from human sacrifice to the burning of Jeanne d’Arc, increase as religion and culture move away from the stage of Bushmen and Andamanese to the stage of Aztec and Polynesian culture.  The Supreme Being is succeeded in advancing civilisation, and under the influences of animism, by ruthless and insatiable ghost-gods, full of the worst human qualities.  Thus there is what we may really call degeneration, moral and religious, inevitably accompanying early progress.

That this is the case, that the first advances in culture necessarily introduce religious degeneration, we shall now try to demonstrate.  But we may observe, in passing, that our array of moral or august savage supreme beings (the first who came to hand) will, for some reason, not be found in anthropological treatises on the Origin of Religion.  They appear, somehow, to have been overlooked by philosophers.  Yet the evidence for them is sufficiently good.  Its excellence is proved by its very uniformity, assuredly undesigned.  An old, nay, an obsolete theory—­that of degeneration in religion—­has facts at its basis, which its very supporters have ignored, which orthodoxy has overlooked.  Thus the Rev. Professor Flint informs the audience in the Cathedral of St. Giles’s, that, in the religions ‘at the bottom of the religious scale,’ ’it is always easy to see how wretchedly the divine is conceived of; how little conscious of his own true wants ... is the poor worshipper.’  The poor worshipper of Baiame wishes to obey His Law, which makes, to some extent, for righteousness.[42]

[Footnote 1:  In Pinkerton, xiii. pp. 13, 39; Prim.  Cult. ii. 342.]

[Footnote 2:  See Preface to this edition for corrected statement.]

[Footnote 3:  Myths of the New World, p. 47.]

[Footnote 4:  There is a description of Virginia, by W. Strachey, including Smith’s remarks, published in 1612.  Strachey interwove some of this work with his own MS. in the British Museum, dedicated to Bacon (Verulam).  This MS. was edited by Mr. Major, for the Hakluyt Society, in 1849, with a glossary, by Strachey, of the native language.  The remarks on religion are in Chapter VII.  The passage on Ahone occurs in Strachey (1612), but not in Smith (1682), in Pinkerton.  I owe to the kindness of Mr. Edmund Gosse photographs of the drawings accompanying the MS. Strachey’s story of sacrifice of children (pp. 94, 95) seems to refer to nothing worse than the initiation into the mysteries.]

[Footnote 5:  See Brinton, Myths of the New World, for a philological theory.]

[Footnote 6:  Compare ‘The Fire Walk’ in Modern Mythology.]