ecture will deal with the place of
Christianity in the evolution of religion.

{34}

IMMORTALITY

The missionary, like any other practical man, requires to know what
science can teach him about the material on which he has to work. So
far as is possible, he should know what materials are sound and can be
used with safety in his constructive work, and what must be thrown
aside, what must be destroyed, if his work is to escape dry-rot and to
stand as a permanent edifice. He should be able to feel confidence,
for instance, not merely that magic and fetichism are the negation of
religion, but that in teaching that fact he has to support him the
evidence collected by the science of religion; and he should have that
evidence placed at his disposal for effective use, if need be.

It may be also that amongst much unsound material he will find some
that is sound, that may be used, and that he cannot afford to cast
away. He has to work upon our common humanity, upon the humanity
common to him and his hearers. He has to remember that no man and no
community of {35} men ever is or has been or ever can be excluded from
the search after God. And his duty, his chosen duty, is to help them
in that search, and as far as may be to make the way clear for them,
and to guide their feet in the right path. He will find that they have
attempted to make paths for themselves; and it is not impossible that
he will find that some of those paths for some distance do go in the
right direction; that some of their beliefs have in them an element of
truth, or a groping after truth which, rightly understood, may be made
to lead to Christianity. It is with one of those beliefs--the belief
in immortality--that I shall deal in this lecture.

It is a fact worthy of notice that the belief in immortality fills, I
will not say a more important, but a more prominent, place in the
hearts and hopes of uncivilised than of civilised man; and it is also a
fact worthy of notice that among primitive men the belief in
immortality is much less intimately bound up with religion than it
comes to be at a later period of evolution. The two facts are probably
not wholly without relation to one another. So long as the belief in
immortality luxuriates and grows wild, so to speak, untrained and
unrestrained by religion, it {36} developes as the fancy wills, and
lives by flattering the fancy. When, however, the relations of a
future life to morality and rel