me to be attached to the worship even of the
Supreme Being. Ghosts and ghost-gods demanded food, and food was therefore
also offered to the Supreme Being.

It was found difficult, or impossible, to induce Christian converts, in
Polynesia, to repeat the old prayers. They began, trembled, and abstained.
They had a ritual 'for almost every act of their lives,' a thing
unfamiliar to low savages. In fact, beyond all doubt, religious criminal
acts, from human sacrifice to the burning of Jeanne d'Arc, increase as
religion and culture move away from the stage of Bushmen and Andamanese to
the stage of Aztec and Polynesian culture. The Supreme Being is succeeded
in advancing civilisation, and under the influences of animism, by
ruthless and insatiable ghost-gods, full of the worst human qualities.
Thus there is what we may really call degeneration, moral and religious,
inevitably accompanying early progress.

That this is the case, that the first advances in culture _necessarily_
introduce religious degeneration, we shall now try to demonstrate. But we
may observe, in passing, that our array of moral or august savage supreme
beings (the first who came to hand) will, for some reason, not be found in
anthropological treatises on the Origin of Religion. They appear, somehow,
to have been overlooked by philosophers. Yet the evidence for them
is sufficiently good. Its excellence is proved by its very uniformity,
assuredly undesigned. An old, nay, an obsolete theory--that of
degeneration in religion--has facts at its basis, which its very
supporters have ignored, which orthodoxy has overlooked. Thus the Rev.
Professor Flint informs the audience in the Cathedral of St. Giles's,
that, in the religions 'at the bottom of the religious scale,' 'it is
always easy to see how wretchedly the divine is conceived of; how little
conscious of his own true wants ... is the poor worshipper.' The poor
worshipper of Baiame wishes to obey His Law, which makes, to some extent,
for righteousness.[42]

[Footnote 1: In Pinkerton, xiii. pp. 13, 39; _Prim. Cult_. ii. 342.]

[Footnote 2: See Preface to this edition for corrected statement.]

[Footnote 3: _Myths of the New World_, p. 47.]

[Footnote 4: There is a description of Virginia, by W. Strachey, including
Smith's remarks, published in 1612. Strachey interwove some of this work
with his own MS. in the British Museum, dedicated to Bacon (Verulam). This
MS. was edited by Mr. Major, for the Hakluyt Soc