existence of religion. It might account for superstitious dread of malignant beings: it does not account for the grateful worship of benignant beings, nor for the universal satisfaction which man finds in that worship.

In the conviction that all events have will for their cause, and in the recognition, bringing with it its own delight, of man's dependence on that will, there was nothing to suggest to the mind of man more than one object of worship; and there is reason to believe that it is a psychological impossibility for the mind of man to seek communion with two objects of worship simultaneously. It is, however, certain that—with the (disputed) exception of the Hebrews -polytheism has been universal amongst mankind; and it is certain that man sought the God, of whose "everlasting power and divinity" from the beginning he was conscious in his heart, in external nature. And there can be no reasonable doubt that this was one of the consequences of his attempt to synthesize the external and internal facts of consciousness by a reasoning process: all external objects were conceived by him as personal, and he identified now one and now another of them with the will with which his heart prompted him to seek communion. If, as is maintained in this book, animals were the first of the external objects that thus came to be worshipped, and totemism was the first form of that worship, then for a long period man continued to have only one object of worship, namely, the totem or tribal god. It was not usually until one tribe united with another or several others to form a new political whole and a new religious community, that polytheism came into existence.

Polytheism presupposes totemism: its existence is in itself proof of the existence of totemism in a previous stage. The animal sacrifices offered to polytheistic gods, the animal forms in which those gods appear in mythology, the animals with which they are associated in art, find their only satisfactory explanation in the hypothesis that those gods were originally totem animals. Totemism, again, is an attempt to translate and express in outward action the union of the human will with the divine. In totemism that outward act took the form of animal sacrifice, because in that

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stage of intellectual development man sought to reconcile his internal and external experience by identifying the personal divine will, which manifested itself to his inner consciousness, with one of the personal agents in the external world that exercised an influence on his fortunes; and the personal agents which his immature reasoning led him to regard as exercising that influence were various species of animals. Having thus chosen as the seat of that influence an external agent, he necessarily adopted an external means of communion with it; and the only means which man in that stage of social development (the tribal) knew for effecting permanent union with anyone external to the tribe, was a blood-covenant. The covenant with the animal totem therefore took the form of participating in the blood of the animal totem. Animal sacrifice continued as an institution long after totemism was a thing of the forgotten past; but as a survival it points back to totemism, as totemism in its turn points to the previous conviction of the necessity and the comfort of union with the divine will.

It is a commonplace that no lie can circulate unless it contains some truth; that it is the element of truth in it which is seen to correspond to facts, and therefore is supposed to lend its countenance to the elements of error associated with it. So in religion, the notion that animal sacrifice was an essential condition of communion with God was an error; but it was an error which could neither have come into existence nor have continued to exist, unless there had been a desire for such communion-and the desire is inexplicable except on the assumption that its satisfaction was found, as a matter of immediate consciousness, to bring spiritual comfort. But it was the patent truth of the facts that floated the erroneous reasoning imposed upon them. The fact that some degree of spiritual communion-in proportion to the extent to which God was revealed to the particular worshipper-was attained after the offering of animal sacrifice, was fallaciously interpreted to imply that communion was the effect of animal sacrifice: post hoc ergo propter hoc. The truth that some external act of worship is necessary to the continued exercise of the habit of faith, may easily be made into an argument in favour of a

so.

mischievous rite. Errors may attach themselves to the truth, but the truth must first be there before they can do 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 manʼs 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 Clement 1 and Cyprian 2 to try all the mysteries of Greece in vain. But of 1 Euseb. Præpar. Evangel. ii. 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.