orality.'[9] Wellhausen has already been cited to the same
effect.

However, the facts proving that truth, and unselfishness, surely a large
element of Christian ethics, are divinely sanctioned in savage religion
are more potent than the most learned opinion on that side.

Our next step was to examine in detail several religions of the most
remote and backward races, of races least contaminated with Christian or
Islamite teaching. Our evidence, when possible, was derived from ancient
and secret tribal mysteries, and sacred native hymns. We found a
relatively Supreme Being, a Maker, sanctioning morality, and unpropitiated
by sacrifice, among peoples who go in dread of ghosts and wizards, but do
not always worship ancestors. We showed that the anthropological theory of
the evolution of God out of ghosts in no way explains the facts in the
savage conception of a Supreme Being. We then argued that the notion of
'spirit,' derived from ghost-belief, was not logically needed for the
conception of a Supreme Being in its earliest form, was detrimental to
the conception, and, by much evidence, was denied to be part of the
conception. The Supreme Being, thus regarded, may be (though he cannot
historically be shown to be) prior to the first notion of ghost and
separable souls.

We then traced the idea of such a Supreme Being through the creeds of
races rising in the scale of material culture, demonstrating that he was
thrust aside by the competition of ravenous but serviceable ghosts,
ghost-gods, and shades of kingly ancestors, with their magic and their
bloody rites. These rites and the animistic conception behind them were
next, in rare cases, reflected or refracted back on the Supreme Eternal.
Aristocratic institutions fostered polytheism with the old Supreme Being
obscured, or superseded, or enthroned as Emperor-God, or King-God. We saw
how, and in what sense, the old degeneration theory could be defined and
defended. We observed traces of degeneration in certain archaic aspects of
the faith in Jehovah; and we proved that (given a tolerably pure low
savage belief in a Supreme Being) that belief _must_ degenerate, under
social conditions, as civilisation advanced. Next, studying what we may
call the restoration of Jehovah, under the great Prophets of Israel, we
noted that they, and Israel generally, were strangely indifferent to that
priceless aspect of Animism, the care for the future happiness, as
conditioned by the conduct