n earth in human form.... Like other primitive people, the Fijians
deified their ancestors.' Yet the Fijians 'may have forgotten the names
of their ancestors three generations back'! How in the world can you deify
a person whom you don't remember? Moreover, only malevolent chiefs were
deified, so apparently a Fijian god is really a well-born human
scoundrel, so considerable that _he_ for one is not forgotten--just as if
we worshipped the wicked Lord Lyttelton! Of course a god like Ahone could
not be made out of such materials as these, and, in fact, we learn from
Mr. Thomson that there are other Fijian gods of a different origin.

'It is probable that there were here and there, _gods that were the
creation of the priests that ministered to them, and were not the
spirits of dead chiefs_. Such was the god of the Bure Tribe on the Ra
coast, who was called Tui Laga or "Lord of Heaven." When the missionaries
first went to convert this town they found the heathen priest their
staunch ally. He declared that they had come to preach the same god that
he had been preaching, the Tui Laga, and that more had been revealed to
them than to him of the mysteries of the god.'

Mr. Thomson is reminded of St. Paul at Athens, 'whom then ye ignorantly
worship, him declare I unto you.'[38]

Mr. Thomson has clearly no bias in favour of a God like our own, known to
savages, and _not_ derived from ghost-worship. He deduces this god, Tui
Laga, from priestly reflection and speculation. But we find such a God
where we find no priests, where a priesthood has not been developed. Such
a God, being usually unpropitiated by sacrifice and lucrative private
practice, is precisely the kind of deity who does not suit a priesthood.
For these reasons--that a priesthood 'sees no money in' a God of this
kind, and that Gods of this kind, ethical and creative, are found where
there are no priesthoods--we cannot look on the conception as a late one
of priestly origin, as Mr. Thomson does, though a learned caste, like the
Peruvian Amantas, may refine on the idea. Least of all can such a God be
'the creation of the priests that minister to him,' when, as in Peru, the
Andaman Isles, and much of Africa, this God is ministered to by no
priests. Nor, lastly, can we regard the absence of sacrifice to the
Creative Being as a mere proof that he is an ancestral ghost who 'had
lived on earth at too remote a time;' for this absence of sacrifice occurs
where ghosts are dreade