the lowest known form of it and thus makes for the belief that the
course of the world's faith has been upward from the first. But it
presents the gravest difficulties; for why should the savage make a
god of a stick or a stone, and attribute to it supernatural powers?
Who told him about a god, that he should call a stick god, or about
supernatural powers, that he should suppose a stick to work wonders?
There is nothing in the stick to suggest such notions; that he should
make gods in this way, that the belief in wonderful powers should
originate in this way, is surely quite incredible. Much more likely
is it, surely, that he got the notion of God from some other quarter
and applied it in his own grotesque and degraded way; than that the
notion of God was taken first from such poor forms and applied
afterwards to objects better suited to it. Religion and civilisation
go hand in hand, and if civilisation can decay (and leading
anthropologists declare that the debased tribes of Australia and West
Africa show signs of a higher civilisation they have lost) then
religion also may decay. A lower race may borrow religious ideas from
a higher and adapt them to their own position, _i.e._ degrade them.
And the progress of religion may still have been upwards on the
whole, although retrograde movements have taken place in certain
races. On these and other grounds it is now held with growing
certainty that fetishism cannot be the original form of religion, and
that the higher stages of it are not to be derived from that one. The
races among whom fetishism is found exhibit a well-known feature of
the decadence of religion, namely that the great god or gods have
grown weak and faint, and smaller gods and spirits have crowded in to
fill up the blank thus caused. Worship is transferred from the great
beings who are the original gods of the tribe and whom it still
professes in a vague way to believe, to numerous smaller beings, and
from the good gods to the bad.

2. Spirits, Human or Quasi-human, came First.--Is the worship of
spirits then the original form of religions. This has been powerfully
maintained in this country by Mr. Herbert Spencer and Mr. Tylor.
According to Mr. Spencer "the rudimentary form of all religion is the
propitiation of dead ancestors." Men concluded, as soon as they were
capable of such reasoning, that the life they witnessed in plants and
animals, in sun and moon and other parts of nature, was due to their
bei