al ghost-propitiating habit.
The latter current, mythological, is full of magic, mummery, and
scandalous legend. Sometimes the latter stream quite pollutes the
former, sometimes they flow side by side, perfectly distinguishable, as
in Aztec ethical piety, compared with the bloody Aztec ritualism.
Anthropology has mainly kept her eyes fixed on the impure stream, the
lusts, mummeries, conjurings, and frauds of priesthoods, while relatively,
or altogether, neglecting (as we have shown) what is honest and of good
report.

The worse side of religion is the less sacred, and therefore the more
conspicuous. Both elements are found co-existing, in almost all races, and
nobody, in our total lack of historical information about the beginnings,
can say which, if either, element is the earlier, or which, if either, is
derived from the other. To suppose that propitiation of corpses and then
of ghosts came first is agreeable, and seems logical, to some writers
who are not without a bias against all religion as an unscientific
superstition. But we know so little! The first missionaries in Greenland
supposed that there was not, there, a trace of belief in a Divine Being.
'But when they came to understand their language better, they found quite
the reverse to be true ... and not only so, but they could plainly gather
from a free dialogue they had with some perfectly wild Greenlanders (at
that time avoiding any direct application to their hearts) that their
ancestors must have believed in a Supreme Being, and did render him some
service, which their posterity neglected little by little...'[21] Mr.
Tylor does not refer to this as a trace of Christian Scandinavian
influence on the Eskimo.[22]

That line, of course, may be taken. But an Eskimo said to a missionary,
'Thou must not imagine that no Greenlander thinks about these things'
(theology). He then stated the argument from design. 'Certainly there
must be some Being who made all these things. He must be very good too...
Ah, did I but know him, how I would love and honour him.' As St. Paul
writes: 'That which may be known of God is manifest in them, for God hath
showed it unto them ... being understood by the things which are made ...
but they became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was
darkened.'[23] In fact, mythology submerged religion. St. Paul's theory of
the origin of religion is not that of an 'innate idea,' nor of a direct
revelation. People, he says, reached