thus: 'People
were bidden to honour their parents, as a compromise between Monotheism
and ghost-worship.' Hard, hard bestead is he who has to reason in that
fashion! This comes of 'training in the use of the weapons of precision of
science.'

Mr. Huxley goes on: 'The Ark of the Covenant may have been a relic of
ancestor-worship;' 'there is a good deal to be said for that speculation.'
Possibly there is, by way of the valuable hypothesis that Jehovah was a
fetish stone which had been a grave-stone, or perhaps a _lingam_, and was
kept in the Ark on the plausible pretext that it was the two Tables of
the Law!

However, Mr. Huxley really finds it safer to suppose that references to
ancestor-worship in the Bible were obliterated by late monotheistic
editors, who, none the less, are so full and minute in their descriptions
of the various heresies into which Israel was eternally lapsing, and must
not be allowed to lapse again. Had ancestor-worship been a _peche mignon_
of Israel, the Prophets would have let Israel hear their mind on it.

The Hebrews' indifference to the departed soul is, in fact, a puzzle,
especially when we consider their Egyptian education--so important an
element in Mr. Huxley's theory.

Mr. Herbert Spencer is not more successful than Mr. Huxley in finding
ancestor-worship among the Hebrews. On the whole subject he writes:

'Where the levels of mental nature and social progress are lowest, we
usually find, along with an absence of religious ideas generally, an
absence, or very slight development, of ancestor-worship.... Cook
[Captain Cook], telling us what the Fuegians were before contact
with Europeans had introduced foreign ideas, said there were no
appearances of religion among them; and we are not told by him or others
that they were ancestor-worshippers.'[4]

Probably they are not; but they do possess a Being who reads their hearts,
and who certainly shows no traces of European ideas. If the Fuegians
are not ancestor-worshippers, this Being was not developed out of
ancestor-worship.

The evidence of Captain Cook, no anthropologist, but a mariner who saw and
knew little of the Fuegians, is precisely of the sort against which Major
Ellis warns us.[5] The more a religion consists in fear of a moral
guardian of conduct, the less does it show itself, by sacrifice or rite,
to the eyes of Captain Cook, of his Majesty's ship _Endeavour_. Mr.
Spencer places the Andamanese on the same level as the Fuegi