nce of a Deity are vague,
at best; and the lines of separation between it and necromancy, medical
magic, and demonology are too faintly separated to allow him to speak
with discrimination. The best reply, as to his religious views, his
mythology, his cosmogony, and his general views as to the mode and
manifestations of the government and providences of God, are to be
found in his myths and legends. When he assembles his lodge-circle, to
hear stories, in seasons of leisure and retirement in the depths of the
forest, he recites precisely what he believes on these subjects. That
restlessness, suspicion, and mistrust of motive, which has closed his
mind to inquiry, is at rest here. If he mingles fiction with history,
there is little of the latter, and it is very easy to see where history
ends and fiction begins. While he amuses his hearers with tales of the
adventures of giants and dwarfs, and the conflicts of Manito with
Manito, fairies and enchanters, monsters and demons, he also throws in
some few grains of instruction, in the form of allegory and fable,
which enable us to perceive glimpses of the heart and its affections.

It is also by his myths that we are able to trace connections with the
human family in other parts of the world. Yet, where the analogies are
so general, there is a constant liability to mistakes. Of these foreign
analogies of myth lore, the least tangible, it is believed, is that
which has been suggested with the Scandinavian mythology. That
mythology is of so marked and peculiar a character, that it has not
been distinctly traced out of the great circle of tribes of the
Indo-Germanic family. Odin, and his terrific pantheon of war-gods and
social deities, could only exist in the dreary latitudes of storms and
fire, which produce a Hecla and a Maelstrom. These latitudes have
invariably produced nations, whose influence has been felt in an
elevating power over the world; and whose tracks have everywhere been
marked by the highest evidences of inductive intellect, centralizing
energy, and practical wisdom and forecast. From such a source the
Indian could have derived none of his vague symbolisms and mental
idiosyncrasies, which have left him, as he is found to-day, without a
government and without a God. Far more probable is it, in seeking for
analogies to his mythology and cosmogony, to resort to the era of that
primal reconstruction of the theory of a Deity, when the human
philosophy in the oriental w