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is side of savage life, even should the needs be low and material which send the savage to his god, though his god be a being who in us would excite the very opposite of reverence, and though his treatment of his god be far from what to us seems worthy, or even though he strove to appease a multitude of spirits which he conceived as flitting about him, before he came to form a settled relation of confidence with one being whom he took for his own god. Where the sense of need has sent a human being to hold intercourse with a higher power, there we hold religion is making its appearance. And if this is universally the case among men at the savage stage, then religion is universal among the ancestors of all nations; it did not need to be invented when kings and priests appeared and wanted it as an instrument for their own purposes; it was there before there were any kings or priests, and is an inheritance which has come down to all mankind from the time when human intelligence first turned to the effort to understand the world. BOOKS RECOMMENDED _For this and the three following chapters_ J. B. Tylor, _Anthropology_, Third Edition, 1891. J. B. Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, Fourth Edition, 1903. Frazer, _The Golden Bough_, Third Edition, 1900. A new edition is now appearing in parts. A. Lang, _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_, new edition, 1899. Th. Achelis, in De la Saussaye. Waitz und Gerland, _Anthropologie der Naturvoelker_, 1859-72. Brinton, _Religions of Primitive Peoples_, 1897. The reports of travellers and missionaries are, of course, important. CHAPTER III THE EARLIEST OBJECTS OF WORSHIP We must now make some attempt to set forth the principal features of the religion of savages. It is an attempt of some difficulty; for savage religion is an immense and bewildering jungle of all manner of extraordinary growths. It is described in detail in large books and if we try to sum it up in a short statement, we may be told that essential features have been omitted. No one set of savages has anything that can be called a system, and different sets of savages are not alike. For the present purpose we are obliged to include under the name, tribes who occupy various positions in the scale of human advancement, and tribes in all sorts of geographical positions, in hot climates and in cold, both rude savages and those who are nobler; and these will, of course, have a variety of ideas and needs, an
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