osts and the consequent
desire to propitiate them acquire an organised ritual in simple forms of
ancestor-worship, such as the Rev. Mr. Turner describes among the people
of Tanna (_l.c._ p. 88); and this line of development may be followed
out until it attains its acme in the State-theology of China and
the Kami-theology [26] of Japan. Each of these is essentially
ancestor-worship, the ancestors being reckoned back through family
groups, of higher and higher order, sometimes with strict reference to
the principle of agnation, as in old Rome; and, as in the latter, it is
intimately bound up with the whole organisation of the State. There are
no idols; inscribed tablets in China, and strips of paper lodged in a
peculiar portable shrine in Japan, represent the souls of the deceased,
or the special seats which they occupy when sacrifices are offered by
their descendants. In Japan it is interesting to observe that a national
Kami--Ten-zio-dai-zin--is worshipped as a sort of Jahveh by the nation
in general, and (as Lippert has observed) it is singular that his
special seat is a portable litter-like shrine, termed the Mikosi, in
some sort analogous to the Israelitic ark. In China, the emperor is
the representative of the primitive ancestors, and stands, as it were,
between them and the supreme cosmic deities--Heaven and Earth--who are
superadded to them, and who answer to the Tangaloa and the Maui of the
Polynesians.

Sciotheism, under the form of the deification of ancestral ghosts, in
its most pronounced form, is therefore the chief element in the theology
of a great moiety, possibly of more than half, of the human race. I
think this must be taken to be a matter of fact--though various opinions
may be held as to how this ancestor-worship came about. But on the other
hand, it is no less a matter of fact that there are very few people
without additional gods, who cannot, with certainty, be accounted for as
deified ancestors.

With all respect for the distinguished authorities on the other side,
I cannot find good reasons for accepting the theory that the cosmic
deities--who are superadded to deified ancestors even in China; who are
found all over Polynesia, in Tangaloa and Maui, and in old Peru, in the
Sun--are the product either of the "search after the infinite," or of
mistakes arising out of the confusion of a great chief's name with the
thing signified by the name. But, however this may be, I think it is
again merely mat