due to exceptional causes. The study of heathen religions, therefore, on evolutionary principles, may throw some light on true religion; if we can ascertain the reasons why they have failed to advance, we shall be able better to appreciate the causes to which progress is really due. This, however, assumes that it is possible scientifically to ascertain the law of growth in the case of pagan religions; and it may seem that they are too hopelessly fallacious, almost insane, in their perversions of the truth. But the study of fallacies is a part, and a very valuable part of logic. Even insanity has its laws, and it is only by their discovery that the medical man can hope to cure the mind diseased. And though the missionary has resources which the physician has not, still it cannot but help him if he starts with a knowledge of the savage's point of view. To the necessity of such knowledge for the missionary, no more eloquent testimony could be given than is afforded by the labour which missionaries have bestowed on the study of native religions, and which provides most of the material for the history of early forms of religion.

To accept the principle, therefore, that religion is evolved, by no means pledges us to reject à priori and without examination the possibility that monotheism may have been the original religion. Nor shall we so reject it here. On the other hand, a writer who approaches the history of religion from the anthropological standpoint cannot start by assuming that monotheism was the original religion. He must start from the facts provided by his science, namely, the religious customs and institutions of the various peoples of the world. And even so, he will not be able to work back to the time of our first parents; anthropology carries us no further back than the period just before the civilised races. appear to our view. It is to this period, therefore, that "primitive man," as he appears in these pages hereafter, belongs; and, let it be borne in mind, he is a hypothesis, like the creatures which have left only a single bone, or a foot-print, behind-he is reconstructed from the traces he has left. He is invented to account for the features common to both civilised man and existing savages, or rather to their ancestors. He is not purely identical with the savage as he now exists, for the savage has existed for a long time, and

we cannot suppose without change-indeed, he can be shown to have retrograded in many cases. Thus between " primitive man and our first parents there is a wide gap; and the anthropologist standing on primitive man's side of the gulf cannot pretend to see or say with certainty what did or did not happen on the other side. Science has not yet even settled the question whether man's origin was monogenetic or polygenetic-though the balance of opinion seems inclined to settle in favour of the former theory.

Whether the anthropologist will fall back upon the Book of Genesis to assist him in his conjectures as to what happened before the earliest times on which his science has any clear light to throw, will depend upon the value he assigns to Genesis, and the interpretation he puts upon it. Some writers argue that Genesis may be literally true, but it never says that religion was revealed. But it seems to me that the account in Genesis could never have been written except by one who believed (1) that monotheism was the original religion, (2) that there never was a time in the history of man when he was without religion, (3) that the revelation of God to man's consciousness was immediate, direct, and carried conviction with it. Now, the first of these three tenets is a point on which we have already touched, and the discussion of which we shall take up again in its proper place. The second is a proposition the falsity of which some writers have endeavoured to demonstrate by producing savage peoples alleged to have no religious ideas whatever. This point we have no intention of discussing, because, as every anthropologist knows, it has now gone to the limbo of dead controversies. Writers approaching the subject from such different points of view as Professor Tylor, Max Müller, Ratzel, de Quatrefages, Tiele, Waitz, Gerland, Peschel, all agree that there are no races, however rude, which are destitute of all idea of religion.

The third is a point which must receive rather fuller treatment here. To the religious-minded man, the existence, the personality of God and communion with Him, are facts of internal but immediate consciousness: he has as direct perception of the light of the soul as he has of the light of the To him, therefore, since God has never at any time.

eye.

anyrate

left Himself without a witness, it is perfectly natural that the same revelation, carrying conviction with it, should have been made to all men in all times. It is this revelation, this element in the common consciousness of all generations of men, which for him constitutes the continuity of religion. He is aware that the facts of consciousness receive very unequal degrees of attention; the mind's eye can only be focussed on one spot in the field of consciousness at the same time, it is but on a chosen few of the mass of presentations flowing in upon the mind that attention can at any one time be concentrated. Indeed, the art of life consists in paying attention to the right things and neglecting the rest; and systematic inattention may be carried to such a point that in course of time the very roar of Niagara becomes, if not inaudible, at any rate unnoticed. Here, then, we have the explanation of that slow process of religious degeneration— due to prolonged and increasing distraction of attentionwhich is, as we have seen, one form of evolution. But as long as religion exists at all, in however degenerate a form, some faint consciousness of the fundamental facts must linger onand it is that consciousness, attenuated as it may be, which constitutes that continuity without which there could be no evolution. If evolution takes place, something must be evolved; and that something, as being continuously present in all the different stages, may be called the continuum of religion. Whether the movement of religion be upwards or downwards, whether its evolution in any given case be a process of progress or of degeneration, it is by the continuum running through all its forms that the highest stages and the lowest are linked together.

Now the existence of this continuum the historian of religion, if he is an evolutionist, has to accept. He is bound to assume its presence from the very beginning of the process of evolution-the process cannot begin without it. The belief that the course of the world is directed by divine agency and personal will, is one the existence of which the historian, even if he could not explain it, would still be bound to assume. He is in exactly the same position as the physicist is. The physicist has to assume the reality of the external world before he can show what consequences his

science can trace from the assumption; but he knows that some philosophers, e.g. Hume and Mill, deny its reality; and that no proof of its reality has been discovered which all philosophers accept. So, too, the historian of religion must assume the reality of the facts of the religious consciousness to begin with, else he cannot explain the various forms they take in the course of their evolution, nor the various customs and institutions in which they find outward expression. But he knows that their reality is confidently denied as well as stoutly asserted. Further, it is clear that physical science cannot prove the existence of the external world; if a physicist were to undertake to devise a chemical experiment which should prove or disprove the existence of matter, he would show thereby that he had not got beyond the Johnsonian stage of the discussion. Physical science, being a body of inferences which flow from the assumption, cannot prove the assumption except by arguing in a vicious circle. So, too, the history of religion has to assume, it cannot prove or disprove, the reality of the facts of the religious consciousness. Perhaps another analogy may make this clearer.

It is only by a slow process of accumulation that human knowledge has reached its present dimensions; the science of the modern savant has been evolved out of the errors of the simple savage. But it would be obviously absurd, therefore, contemptuously to pooh-pooh the discoveries of modern science as merely survivals of the old erroneous way of looking at the world. And it is equally fallacious to talk, as both friends and foes of religion do sometimes talk, as though the application of the theory of evolution to religion would reduce the higher forms of it to mere survivals of barbarism, animism, and so on. The art of Phidias was evolved out of something of which we may almost say that it was artistic only in intention; but the man would be to be pitied who could see nothing in the highest art of Greece but survivals of a barbaric stage of carving. Art is a mode of expression, whereby the artist delivers himself of his message. It is common to both barbaric and civilised man; and the inference is that it is neither peculiarly barbaric nor specifically civilised, but universally human. So, too, with religion as a form of thought, the perception of "the invisible things of Him

through the things that are made"; it is common both to barbaric and civilised man, but it is not therefore a barbaric form of thought-rather it is a mode of cognition which is part of human nature. The perfect beauty of fully-developed art is of course not present in its rude beginnings; but even the barbaric artist is feeling after the ideal if peradventure he may find it.

In the case of science, the continuum which, however fine and long drawn out, yet links the savant to the savage, is their common belief in the uniformity of Nature. Now, the savage doubtless often wrongly applies this belief. He sees uniformities where they do not exist, but we do not regard this as a proof that Nature is not uniform. He ascribes events to their wrong causes, but this does not shake our faith in the proposition that every event has a cause. So, too, the belief that all things are ruled by supernatural will is not proved to be false because it is often wrongly applied. When the history of religion has recorded all the wrong applications of the belief, the validity of the belief has still to be tested on quite other grounds and with quite other tests by the philosophy of religion. The validity of the belief in the uniformity of Nature is in nowise affected by the vast array of errors contained in the history of science. Unfortunately, though we all believe in the uniformity of Nature, as we all believe in the reality of the external world, there is no satisfactory way of proving either to be true. The average man of science simply walks, and wisely walks, by faith in these matters; he takes it for granted that Nature is uniform and that the external world is real. And in religion the average man may do worse than imitate the example given him in science. It is the boast of science that it deals with things, not names; that it proves everything by experience, brings every proposition to the test of immediate consciousness. Religion has no other proof, no other test for its truths; it is by his own experience a man proves the truth that "blessed are the humble and meek"; it is by the test of immediate consciousness that he learns-if he does learn that God "is not far from each one of us."