l confusion a certain consistency of view
is to be observed. It might be expected that the savage habit of
thought, acting independently in different parts of the world, would
lead to an infinite number of divergent and inconsistent views of the
nature of things and of man's place in the world. But this is not
found to be the case. Mr. Lang accounts as follows for the diffusion
of the same stories all over the world: "An ancient identity of
mental status, and the working of similar mental forces at the
attempt to explain the same phenomena, will account without any
theory of borrowing, or of transmission of myth, or of original unity
of race, for the world-wide diffusion of many mythical conceptions."
Mr. Tylor says that the same imaginative processes regularly recur,
that world-wide myths show the regularity and the consistency of the
human imagination. M. Reville, in his _Religions des peuples
non-civilises_, remarks that the character of savage religions is
everywhere the same; that only the forms vary.

Now of the things that all savages possess, certainly religion is
one. It is practically agreed that religion, the belief in and
worship of gods, is universal at the savage stage; and the accounts
which some travellers have given of tribes without religion are
either set down to misunderstanding, or are thought to be
insufficient to invalidate the assertion that religion is a universal
feature of savage life.

How did it get there? How comes it that men so near the lowest human
state, so devoid of all that has been since acquired, should yet be
found to have this mode of thought universally diffused among them?

It has been ascribed to a primitive revelation. At the beginning, it
is said, God, with the other gifts He gave to man, gave him religion;
that is to say, gave him not only a disposition for reverence and
piety, but a certain amount of religious knowledge, so that he set
out with a stock of religious ideas which were not elaborated by his
own efforts, but bestowed on him ready made. It is impossible,
however, to conceive how this could be done. If the religion given at
first was a lofty and pure one,--and no other need be thought of in
such a connection,--then it implies a condition of human life far
above the struggles and uncertainties of savage existence; and both
the civilisation and the religion must have been lost afterwards. But
how could all mankind forget a pure religion? Mankind in that case
can