usually gilded. Sometimes these have been carved in the island.
Sometimes the poor folk have taken the trouble to bring them all the
way from India on board ship. Hung beside them on the walls are
little pictures, often very well executed in the miniature-like
Hindoo style by native artists in the island. Large brass pots,
which have some sacred meaning, stand about, and with them a curious
trident-shaped stand, about four feet high, on the horns of which
garlands of flowers are hung as offerings. The visitor is told that
the male figures are Mahadeva, and the female Kali: we could hear
of no other deities. I leave it to those who know Indian mythology
better than I do, to interpret the meaning--or rather the past
meaning, for I suspect it means very little now--of all this
trumpery and nonsense, on which the poor folk seem to spend much
money. It was impossible, of course, even if one had understood
their language, to find out what notions they attached to it all;
and all I could do, on looking at these heathen idol chapels, in the
midst of a Christian and civilised land, was to ponder, in sadness
and astonishment, over a puzzle as yet to me inexplicable; namely,
how human beings first got into their heads the vagary of
worshipping images. I fully allow the cleverness and apparent
reasonableness of M. Comte's now famous theory of the development of
religions. I blame no one for holding it. But I cannot agree with
it. The more of a 'saine appreciation,' as M. Comte calls it, I
bring to bear on the known facts; the more I 'let my thought play
freely around them,' the more it is inconceivable to me, according
to any laws of the human intellect which I have seen at work, that
savage or half-savage folk should have invented idolatries. I do
not believe that Fetishism is the parent of idolatry; but rather--as
I have said elsewhere--that it is the dregs and remnants of
idolatry. The idolatrous nations now, as always, are not the savage
nations; but those who profess a very ancient and decaying
civilisation. The Hebrew Scriptures uniformly represent the non-
idolatrous and monotheistic peoples, from Abraham to Cyrus, as lower
in what we now call the scale of civilisation, than the idolatrous
and polytheistic peoples about them. May not the contrast between
the Patriarchs and the Pharaohs, David and the Philistines, the
Persians and the Babylonians, mark a law of history of wide