mischievous rite. Errors may attach themselves to the truth, but the truth must first be there before they can do 80. In this sense, that is to say logically, totemism, animalworship, presupposes a stage in which man had not yet found, as he supposed, in the external world the source of his inner consciousness of the divine, and had not yet identified it, by a process of vain reasoning, with an animal species. The historical existence of this stage can only be matter of conjecture, and must rest mainly on the difficulty of supposing that man, the moment he was man, invented the idea of animal sacrifice an idea which, whatever its origin, can hardly be regarded as innate or even as obvious. The nature of religious belief in the pre-totemistic stage is also entirely matter of conjecture. That it was exclusively of the nature of fear is, however, improbable. Man did indeed find himself in the midst of a world of forces (conceived by him as personal agents) over which he had in the main no control, and by which his fortunes were affected, often disastrously. But these forces were not all of them inimical, that he should fear them. Again, love and gratitude are just as natural, just as much integral parts of the constitution of man, as fear and hatred. There is no probability in the idea that the only emotion early man felt or was capable of feeling was fear. Indeed, the fact that in the totemistic stage he selected now one and now another of the personal agents, which made up the world for him, as the embodiment of the Being after whom his heart instinctively sought peradventure it might find Him, is itself a presumption that he did not regard everything external with fear. In the same way the fact that in the stage of totemism the clan has but one totem, one tribal god, constitutes some presumption that man was conscious of but one God, before he identified Him with one or other of the forces of nature. So far belief in this stage may be termed monotheism; for, as already said, there is reason to believe that polytheism was developed out of totemism, and does not occur until a relatively late period in the evolution of society. On the other hand, man's consciousness of God must, in this early stage, have been so rudimentary, ex hypothesi, as to permit of His coming to be conceived, by a process of vain reasoning, as manifesting Himself in animal form. And this is in accordance with all that science teaches as to early man's undeveloped condition, material and mental, social and moral. Once more, we must remember that the facts of consciousness were the same for early as for civilised man; but they were not as yet discriminated They swam before man's untrained eye, and ran into one another. Even the fundamental division of objects into animate and inanimate had not been fixed. But even so, all was not irrational chaos for man. In the outer world of his experience, the laws of nature, which are God's laws, worked with the same regularity then as now. In the world of his inner experience, God was not far from him at any time. If he could not formulate the laws of nature, at least he had the key to their comprehension in the conviction, not expressed but acted on, that nature was uniform. If his spiritual vision was dim, his consciousness of God was at least so strong, to start with, that he has never since ceased seeking after Him. The law of continuity holds of religion as of other things. Finally, sacrifice and the sacramental meal which followed on it are institutions which are or have been universal. The sacramental meal, wherever it exists, testifies to man's desire for the closest union with his god, and to his consciousness of the fact that it is upon such union alone that right social relations with his fellow-man can be set. But before there can be a sacramental meal there must be a sacrifice. That is to say, the whole human race for thousands of years has been educated to the conception that it was only through a divine sacrifice that perfect union with God was possible for man. At times the sacramental conception of sacrifice appeared to be about to degenerate entirely into the gift theory; but then, in the sixth century B.C., the sacramental conception woke into new life, this time in the form of a search for a perfect sacrifice-a search which led Clement1 and Cyprian 2 to try all the mysteries of Greece in vain. But of 1 Euseb. Præpar. Evangel. ii. 2. 2 Foucart, Associations Religieuses, 76, note 2, all the great religions of the world it is the Christian Church alone which is so far heir of all the ages as to fulfil the dumb, dim expectation of mankind: in it alone the sacramental meal commemorates by ordinance of its founder the divine sacrifice which is a propitiation for the sins of all mankind. Acropolis, 332 Actors, sacred, 351 Ainos, name of dead taboo, 61; altar- Algonkuins, grave-posts, 196 Allegory, as the interpretation of Alliance between clan and god, 169, 170; between totem and clan, 214 Adoration as primitive as fear in Ally, supernatural, sought by man, 154 religion, 21 schines, 338-40 Eschylus, 16; and the mysteries, 360, Agricultural times, sacrificial rite first Altar, a pole or pile to mark the place Amazon peoples, dead buried in house, Ambon, cure for disease, 45 Ahts, blood offering, 171; next world, Anaxagoras, on myths, 267 308 Ahura Mazda, 305 Ancestor-worship, not the source of |