hymns of the Vedas, instead of exhibiting a type of religious belief of a more animistic character than that which now prevails, are distinguished by a freedom from such superstitions, and an elevation of religious sentiment, for which we may seek in vain in the religious literature of modern Puranic Hindooism. There is not a single fact to show that the progress of religious thought in India has been upward from an early fetishism or animism to a more enlightened type of faith, but the exact reverse.1

But we are reminded that, as just remarked, the more ancient, aboriginal tribes whom the Hindoos found in India worshipped, and still worship, various spirits, whose power they dread, and whom they seek to propitiate. But there are well-attested facts which forbid us to suppose, as Professor Tiele's theory would require, that we have here an instance of the survival to modern times of a primitive form of faith. The Santals, the most numerous and important of these aboriginal tribes, have a tradition, universally accepted by them as true, that in

1 For a fuller exhibition of the facts, see Lecture VII.

the beginning they were not worshippers of demons as now. They say that, very long ago, their first parents were created by the living God; that they at first worshipped and served Him; that they were seduced from their allegiance by an evil spirit, Marang Buru, who persuaded them to drink an intoxicating liquor, made from the fruit of a certain tree. In consequence, they came under the power of the Evil Spirit, and hence, from that time until now, have had to worship and serve him and the evil demons subject to him, instead of the one God of their first fathers. That this remarkable tradition, so wonderfully like the Genesis story, can have been derived from this, through direct or indirect communication with Judaism or Christianity, is apparently, in this case, out of the question; for, from an unknown. antiquity, the Santàls, in common with other cognate non-Aryan tribes, holding similar traditions, have lived in the mountains and jungles, far off the lines of travel, commerce, and conquest.

There is thus decisive reason for refusing

to regard the fetishism and polydemonism of the aborigines of India as a survival of a primitive cult. These, like many other similar tribes in other parts of the world, furnish in their ancient traditions a weighty argument, not for, but against Professor Tiele's theory of a primitive animism, or that of an original fetish-worship. Instead then of finding a substantial basis for any such theory of the origin of religion in the literature and traditions of various races, the more that these are known and studied, the more do facts appear like the above, which are irreconcilable with its truth. They are such as show, to use the words of Professor Max Müller, that "the history of most religions might be called a corruption of their primitive purity," and that "fetishism is really the very last stage in the downward course of religion.":

2

Finally, neither the fetish nor the animistic. theory of the origin of religion, if assumed as an hypothesis, accounts for those phenomena con

1 "The Origin and Growth of Religion," p. 69.

2 "Natural Religion," p. 158.

nected with religion which most imperatively demand an explanation. It is said that, in the primitive savagery, men could not have had the idea of a personal God, as the Creator and the moral Governor of all, and of their relation to Him, as dependent and responsible beings. But it is certain that they have it now; and in explanation of this, we are told that religion originated, through a process of natural evolution, from a primitive fetishism or animism; which, again, arose, in the first instance, as the result of an ignorant misinterpretation of nature.

But how is it possible that out of such a chaos of crude superstitions as is described by Tiele, Pfleiderer, and others, should have developed the ideas of responsibility, and of sin, and of guilt? Surely, the more deeply that one thinks what is involved in these conceptions, the more insuperable will appear the difficulty of supposing that religion should have had such an origin as animism or fetish-worship.

LECTURE III.

MR. HERBERT SPENCER'S GHOST THEORY OF THE

ORIGIN OF RELIGION.

THE theories of an original fetishism, or a "chaotic naturism," or animism, as advocated respectively by Des Brosses, Pfleiderer, Tiele, and others, we have seen to be inadequate to account for many undoubted phenomena connected with religion. In particular, the explanation of the supposed primitive animism, as due to the extreme ignorance of the first men, who mistakenly ascribed life to everything that moved or exhibited power, postulates a supposition as to their condition which to many will seem, on scientific grounds, more difficult of acceptance than the assumed original animism which it is supposed to explain.

Mr. Herbert Spencer has evidently felt this, and, while maintaining that the original form of religion must have been the worship of spirits,