ks and Semites in their
earliest known myths. Setting mythology aside and looking only at cult,
the God of the Murring or the Kurnai, whose precepts soften the heart,
who knows the heart's secrets, who inculcates chastity, respect of age,
unselfishness, who is not bound by conditions of space or place, who
receives no blood of slaughtered man or beast, is a conception from which
the ordinary polytheistic gods of infinitely more polite peoples are
frankly degenerate. The animistic superstitions wildly based on the belief
in the soul have not soiled him, and the social conditions of aristocracy,
agriculture, architecture, have not made him one in a polytheistic
crowd of rapacious gods, nor fettered him as a Baal to his estate, nor
localised him in a temple built with hands. He cannot appear as a 'God of
Battles;' no _Te Deum_ can be sung to him for victory in a cause perhaps
unjust, for he is the Supreme Being of a certain group of allied local
tribes. One of these tribes has no more interest with him than another,
and the whole group do not, as a body, wage war on another alien group.
The social conditions of his worshippers, then, preserve Darumulun from
the patent blots on the escutcheon of gods among much more advanced races.

Once more, the idea of Animism admits of endless expansion. A spirit can
be located anywhere, in any stone, stick, bush, person, hill, or river. A
god made on the animistic model can be assigned to any department of
human activity, down to sports, or lusts, or the province of Cloacina.
Thus religion becomes a mere haunted and pestilential jungle of beliefs.
But the theistic conception, when not yet envisaged as spiritual, cannot
be subdivided and _eparpille_. Thus, from every point of view, and on
every side, Animism is full of the seeds of religious degeneration, which
do not and cannot exist in what I take to be the earliest known form of
the theistic conception: that of a Being about whose metaphysical
nature--spirit or not spirit--no questions were asked, as Dr. Brinton long
ago remarked.

That conception alone could neither supply the moral motive of 'a soul to
be saved,' nor satisfy the metaphysical instinct of advancing mankind. To
meet these wants, to supply 'soul,' with its moral stimulus, and to
provide a phrase or idea under which the Deity could be envisaged (i.e. as
a _spirit_) by advancing thought, Animism was necessary. The blending of
the theistic and the animistic beliefs was in