o better it would
have seemed rank blasphemy. Religion, so conceived, left no place for
development. "The Truth" might be learnt, but never critically examined;
being thus avowedly complete and final, it was doomed to stagnation.

The details of this supposed revelation seem almost too naive for
enumeration. As Hume observed, "popular theology has a positive appetite
for absurdity." It is sufficient to recall that "revelation" included
such items as the Creation (It is interesting to note that the very
word "Creator" has nowadays almost passed into the region of mythology.
Instead we have "L'Evolution Creatrice".) of the world out of nothing in
six days; the making of Eve from one of Adam's ribs; the Temptation by
a talking snake; the confusion of tongues at the tower of Babel; the
doctrine of Original Sin; a scheme of salvation which demanded the
Virgin Birth, Vicarious Atonement, and the Resurrection of the material
body. The scheme was unfolded in an infallible Book, or, for one section
of Christians, guarded by the tradition of an infallible Church, and on
the acceptance or refusal of this scheme depended an eternity of weal or
woe. There is not one of these doctrines that has not now been recast,
softened down, mysticised, allegorised into something more conformable
with modern thinking. It is hard for the present generation, unless
their breeding has been singularly archaic, to realise that these
amazing doctrines were literally held and believed to constitute the
very essence of religion; to doubt them was a moral delinquency.

It had not, however, escaped the notice of travellers and missionaries
that savages carried on some sort of practices that seemed to be
religious, and believed in some sort of spirits or demons. Hence, beyond
the confines illuminated by revealed truth, a vague region was assigned
to NATURAL Religion. The original revelation had been kept intact only
by one chosen people, the Jews, by them to be handed on to Christianity.
Outside the borders of this Goshen the world had sunk into the darkness
of Egypt. Where analogies between savage cults and the Christian
religions were observed, they were explained as degradations; the
heathen had somehow wilfully "lost the light." Our business was not to
study but, exclusively, to convert them, to root out superstition and
carry the torch of revelation to "Souls in heathen darkness lying." To
us nowadays it is a commonplace of anthropological research th