The evidence of Captain Cook, no anthropologist, but a mariner who saw and knew little of the Fuegians, is precisely of the sort against which Major Ellis warns us.[5] The more a religion consists in fear of a moral guardian of conduct, the less does it show itself, by sacrifice or rite, to the eyes of Captain Cook, of his Majesty’s ship Endeavour.  Mr. Spencer places the Andamanese on the same level as the Fuegians, ’so far as the scanty evidence may be trusted.’  We have shown that (as known to Mr. Spencer in 1876) it may not be trusted at all; the Andamanese possessing a moral Supreme Being, though they are not, apparently, ancestor-worshippers.  The Australians ’show us not much persistence in ghost-propitiation,’ which, if it exists, ceases when the corpses are tied up and buried, or after they are burned, or after the bones, carried about for a while, are exposed on platforms.  Yet many Australian tribes possess a moral Supreme Being.

In fact ghost-worship, in Mr. Spencer’s scheme, cannot be fairly well developed till society reaches the level of ’settled groups whose burial-places are in their midst.’  Hence the development of a moral Supreme Being among tribes not thus settled, is inconceivable, on Mr. Spencer’s hypothesis.[6] By that hypothesis, ’worshipped ancestors, according to their remoteness, were regarded as divine, semi-divine, and human.’[7] Where we find, then, the Divine Being among nomads who do not remember their great-grandfathers, the Spencerian theory is refuted by facts.  We have the effect, the Divine Being, without the cause, worship of ancestors.

Coming to the Hebrews, Mr. Spencer argues that ’the silence of their legends (as to ancestor-worship) is but a negative fact, which may be as misleading as negative facts usually are.’  They are, indeed; witness Mr. Spencer’s own silence about savage Supreme Beings.  But we may fairly argue that if Israel had been given to ancestor-worship (as might partly be surmised from the mystery about the grave of Moses) the Prophets would not have spared them for their crying.  The Prophets were unusually outspoken men, and, as they undeniably do scold Israel for every other kind of conceivable heresy, they were not likely to be silent about ancestor-worship, if ancestor-worship existed.  Mr. Spencer, then, rather heedlessly, though correctly, argues that ’nomadic habits are unfavourable to evolution of the ghost-theory.’[8] Alas, this gives away the whole case!  For, if all men began as nomads, and nomadic habits are unfavourable even to the ordinary ghost, how did the Australian and other nomads develop the Supreme Being, who, ex hypothesi, is the final fruit of the ghost-flower?  If you cannot have ‘an established ancestor-worship’ till you abandon nomadic habits, how, while still nomadic, do you evolve a Supreme Being?  Obviously not out of ancestor-worship.

Mr. Spencer then assigns, as evidence for ancestor-worship in Israel, mourning dresses, fasting, the law against self-bleeding and cutting off the hair for the dead, and the text (Deut. xxvi. 14) about ’I have not given aught thereof for the dead.’  ’Hence, the conclusion must be that ancestor-worship had developed as far as nomadic habits allowed, before it was repressed by a higher worship.’[9] But whence came that higher worship which seems to have intervened immediately after the cessation of nomadic habits?