he earlier portions of revelation which they possessed became
disintegrated into a polytheism which takes very largely the form of
animism, or of attributing some special spiritual indwelling to all
natural objects, and also that of worship of ancestors and heroes. The
portion of primitive theological belief to which they have clung most
persistently is the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, which in
all their religious beliefs occupies a prominent place, and has always
been connected with special attention to rites of sepulture and
monuments to the dead. Their version of the revelation of creation
appears most distinctly in the sacred book of the Quiches of Central
America, and in the creation myths of the Mexicans, Iroquois,
Algonquins, and other North American tribes; and it has been handed
down to us through the Semitic Assyrians from the ancient
Chaldaeo-turanian population of the valley of the Euphrates.

The Aryan races have been remarkable for their changeable and
versatile character. Their religious ideas in the most primitive times
appear to have been not dissimilar from those of the Turanians; and
the Indians, Persians, Greeks, Scandinavians, and Celts have all gone
some length in developing and modifying these, apparently by purely
human imaginative and intellectual materials. But all these
developments were defective in a moral point of view, and had lost the
stability and rational basis which proceed from monotheism. Hence they
have given way before other and higher faiths; and at this day the
more advanced nations of the Aryan, or in Scriptural language the
Japhetic stock, have adopted the Semitic faith; and, as Noah long ago
predicted, "dwell in the tents of Shem." No indigenous account of the
genesis of things remains among the Aryan races, with the exception of
that in the Avesta, and in some ancient Hindoo hymns, and these are
merely variations of the Turanian or Semitic cosmogony. God has given
to the Aryans no special revelations of his will, and they would have
been left to grope for themselves along the paths of science and
philosophy, but for the advent among them of the prophets of "Jehovah
the God of Shem."

It is to the Semitic race that God has been most liberal in his gift
of inspiration. Gathering up and treasuring the old common
inheritance of religion, and eliminating from it the accretions of
superstition, the children of Abraham at one time stood alone, or
almost alone, as adher