In their hearts, on their lips, in their moral training we find (however blended with barbarous absurdities, and obscured by rites of another origin) the faith in a Being who created or constructed the world; who was from time beyond memory or conjecture; who is primal, who makes for righteousness, and who loves mankind.  This Being has not the notes of degeneration; his home is ‘among the stars,’ not in a hill or in a house.  To him no altar smokes, and for him no blood is shed.

’God, that made the world and all things therein, seeing that He is lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; neither is worshipped with men’s hands, as though He needed any thing ... and hath made of one blood all nations of men ... that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after Him, and find Him, though He be not far from every one of us:  for in Him we live, and move, and have our being.’

That the words of St. Paul are literally true, as to the feeling after a God who needs not anything at man’s hands, the study of anthropology seems to us to demonstrate.  That in this God ‘we have our being,’ in so far as somewhat of ours may escape, at moments, from the bonds of Time and the manacles of Space, the earlier part of this treatise is intended to suggest, as a thing by no means necessarily beyond a reasonable man’s power to conceive.  That these two beliefs, however attained (a point on which we possess no positive evidence), have commonly been subject to degeneration in the religions of the world, is only too obvious.

So far, then, the nature of things and of the reasoning faculty does not seem to give the lie to the old Degeneration theory.

To these conclusions, as far as they are matters of scientific opinion, we have been led by nothing but the study of anthropology.

[Footnote 1:  Myths of the New World, p. 44.]

[Footnote 2:  Prim.  Cult. i. 35.]

[Footnote 3:  Introduction, p. 199; also p. 161.]

[Footnote 4:  Prim.  Cult. ii. 360,361.]

[Footnote 5:  Prof.  Menzies, History of Religion, p. 23.]

[Footnote 6:  [Greek:  legomenai theion anagchai.] Porphyry.]

[Footnote 7:  Ixtlilochitl.  Balboa, Hist. du Perou, p. 62.]

[Footnote 8:  Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, pp. 104, 105.]

[Footnote 9:  Op. cit. p. 106.]

[Footnote 10:  On the Glenelg some caves and mountain tops are haunted or holy.  Waitz, vi. 804, No authority cited.]

[Footnote 11:  Religion of Semites, p. 110.]

[Footnote 12:  Rel.  Sem. p. 71.]

[Footnote 13:  Howitt, J.A.T. 1884, p. 187.]

[Footnote 14:  Op. cit. p. 188.]

[Footnote 15:  Rel.  Sem. p. 207.]

[Footnote 16:  Rel.  Sem. p. 225.]

[Footnote 17:  Op. cit. p. 247.]