fed the kas of the departed—­might pick up a trace of a custom, the giving of food for the dead, still persevered in by St. Monica till St. Ambrose admonished her.  But Mr. Huxley is hard put to it for evidence of ancestor-worship or ghost-worship in Israel when he looks for indications of these rites in ’the singular weight attached to the veneration of parents in the Fourth Commandment.’[3] The Fourth Commandment, of course, is a slip of the pen.  He adds:  ’The Fifth Commandment, as it stands, would be an excellent compromise between ancestor-worship and Monotheism.’  Long may children practise this excellent compromise!  It is really too far-fetched to reason thus:  ’People were bidden to honour their parents, as a compromise between Monotheism and ghost-worship.’  Hard, hard bestead is he who has to reason in that fashion!  This comes of ’training in the use of the weapons of precision of science.’

Mr. Huxley goes on:  ’The Ark of the Covenant may have been a relic of ancestor-worship;’ ‘there is a good deal to be said for that speculation.’  Possibly there is, by way of the valuable hypothesis that Jehovah was a fetish stone which had been a grave-stone, or perhaps a lingam, and was kept in the Ark on the plausible pretext that it was the two Tables of the Law!

However, Mr. Huxley really finds it safer to suppose that references to ancestor-worship in the Bible were obliterated by late monotheistic editors, who, none the less, are so full and minute in their descriptions of the various heresies into which Israel was eternally lapsing, and must not be allowed to lapse again.  Had ancestor-worship been a peche mignon of Israel, the Prophets would have let Israel hear their mind on it.

The Hebrews’ indifference to the departed soul is, in fact, a puzzle, especially when we consider their Egyptian education—­so important an element in Mr. Huxley’s theory.

Mr. Herbert Spencer is not more successful than Mr. Huxley in finding ancestor-worship among the Hebrews.  On the whole subject he writes: 

’Where the levels of mental nature and social progress are lowest, we usually find, along with an absence of religious ideas generally, an absence, or very slight development, of ancestor-worship....  Cook [Captain Cook], telling us what the Fuegians were before contact with Europeans had introduced foreign ideas, said there were no appearances of religion among them; and we are not told by him or others that they were ancestor-worshippers.’[4]

Probably they are not; but they do possess a Being who reads their hearts, and who certainly shows no traces of European ideas.  If the Fuegians are not ancestor-worshippers, this Being was not developed out of ancestor-worship.