the new world which sprang forth from the ruins of the old, we find,
soon after the cataclysm, the immediate descendants of Noah in the
possession of at least two religious truths, which they received from
their common father, and which he must have derived from the line of
patriarchs who preceded him. These truths were the doctrine of the
existence of a Supreme Intelligence, the Creator, Preserver, and Ruler of
the Universe, and, as a necessary corollary, the belief in the immortality
of the soul[1], which, as an emanation from that primal cause, was to be
distinguished, by a future and eternal life, from the vile and perishable
dust which forms its earthly tabernacle.

The assertion that these doctrines were known to and recognized by Noah
will not appear as an assumption to the believer in divine revelation. But
any philosophic mind must, I conceive, come to the same conclusion,
independently of any other authority than that of reason.

The religious sentiment, so far, at least, as it relates to the belief in
the existence of God, appears to be in some sense innate, or instinctive,
and consequently universal in the human mind[2]. There is no record of
any nation, however intellectually and morally debased, that has not given
some evidence of a tendency to such belief. The sentiment may be
perverted, the idea may be grossly corrupted, but it is nevertheless
there, and shows the source whence it sprang[3].

Even in the most debased forms of fetichism, where the negro kneels in
reverential awe before the shrine of some uncouth and misshapen idol,
which his own hands, perhaps, have made, the act of adoration, degrading
as the object may be, is nevertheless an acknowledgment of the longing
need of the worshipper to throw himself upon the support of some unknown
power higher than his own sphere. And this unknown power, be it what it
may, is to him a God.[4]

But just as universal has been the belief in the immortality of the soul.
This arises from the same longing in man for the infinite; and although,
like the former doctrine, it has been perverted and corrupted, there
exists among all nations a tendency to its acknowledgment. Every people,
from the remotest times, have wandered involuntarily into the ideal of
another world, and sought to find a place for their departed spirits. The
deification of the dead, man-worship, or hero-worship, the next
development of the religious idea after fetichism, was simply an
acknowled