of animal instinct.  And there is yet another obstacle in dealing with such people, their intense and childish sensitiveness and secretiveness.  They are not, as some have foolishly supposed, ashamed of their tenets or their practices, but they are unwilling to speak about them.  They fear the intentions of the cross-questioner, and they hold themselves safest behind a crooked answer.  Moreover, every Mpongwe is his own “pontifex maximus,” and the want, or rather the scarcity, of a regular priesthood must promote independence and discrepancy of belief.

Whilst noticing the Fetishism of the Gaboon I cannot help observing, by the way, how rapidly the civilization of the nineteenth century is redeveloping, together with the “Religion of Humanity” the old faith, not of Paganism, but of Cosmos, of Nature; how directly it is, in fact, going back to its oldergods.  The unknowable of our day is the Brahm, the Akarana-Zaman, the Gaboon Anyambia, of which nothing can be predicated but an existence utterly unintelligible to the brain of man, a something free from the accidents of personality, of volition, of intelligence, of design, of providence; a something which cannot be addressed by veneration or worship; whose sole effects are subjective, that is, upon the worshipper, not upon the worshipped.  Nothing also can be more illogical than the awe and respect claimed by Mr. Herbert Spencer for a being of which the very essence is that nothing can be known of it.  And, as the idea grows, the several modes and forms of the unknowable, the Hormuzd and Ahriman of the Dualist, those personifications of good and evil; the Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, creation, preservation, and destruction; the beginning, the middle, and the end of all things; the Triad, adored by all Triadists under some modification, as that of Osiris, Isis, and Horus, father, mother, and son, type of the family; or Jupiter, Neptune, and Pluto, the three great elements; these outward and visible expressions lose force and significance, making place for that Law of which they are the rude exponents.  The marvellous spread of Spiritualism, whose god is the unknowable, and whose prophet was Swedenborg, is but the polished form of the Mpongwe Ibambo and Ilogo; the beneficent phantasms have succeeded to the malevolent ghosts, the shadowy deities of man’s childhood; as the God of Love formerly took the place of the God of Fear.  The future of Spiritualism, which may be defined as “Hades with Progress,” is making serious inroads upon the coarse belief, worthy of the barbarous and the middle ages, in an eternity of punishment, easily expressed by everlasting fire, and in ineffable joys, which no one has ever successfully expressed.  The ghosts of our childhood have now become bona fide objective beings, who rap, raise tables, display fireworks, rain flowers, and brew tea.  We explain by “levitation” the riding of the witch upon the broom-stick to the Sabbath; we can no longer refuse credence to Canidia and all her spells.  And the very vagueness of the modern faith serves to assimilate it the more to its most ancient forms, one of which we are studying upon the Gaboon River.