, no
conception whatever of a personal "Power that makes for Righteousness."
If Protestants have almost as crude an idea of the religion of their
Catholic fellow-Christians with whom they live side by side, and
converse in the same language, if they are so absolutely dominated by
their own form of religious thought, as to be as helpless as idiots in
the presence of any other, can we expect that the ordinary British
traveller, "brandishing his Bible and his bath," strong in the smug
conviction of his mental, moral, and religious preeminence, will be a
very sympathetic, conscientious, and reliable interpreter of the
religion of the Zulu or the Andamanese?

The fact is that without a preliminary hypothesis he would see nothing
at all except dire confusion. But an assumption such as that of
"animism," has the selective power of a magnet, drawing to itself all
congruous facts and little filings of probability, until it so bristles
over with evidence that a hedge-hog is easier to handle.

But before discussing the relation of this assumption to existing facts
and so bringing it to an _a posteriori_ test, let us examine its _a
priori_ supports.

First of all, as Mr. Lang points out, it takes for granted that the
savage can have no idea of the Creator until he conceive Him as a
spirit. "God is a spirit," has been dinned into our ears from childhood;
and hence we conclude that he who has no notion of a spirit can have no
notion of God; and that the idea of God is of later growth than that of
a ghost. In truth, he who ascribes to God a body does not know _all_
about Him; but which of us knows _all_ about God? The point is, not
whether the savage can know the metaphysics of divinity, but whether he
can conceive a primal eternal moral being, author of all things, man's
father and judge--a conception which abstracts entirely from the
question of matter and spirit. We ourselves, like the savage,
necessarily speak of God and imagine Him humanwise,--although our
instructed reason, at times, corrects the error of our fancy,--and
perhaps only "at times,"--only when we leave the ground of spontaneous
thought, to walk on metaphysical stilts--nor while that childish image
remains uncorrected and we neither affirm nor deny to Him a body, can
our notion be called false, however obscure it be and inadequate. If the
savage has no notion of spirit, yet he may have, and often seems to have
a very true, though of course infinitely imperfect, no