no bias in his favor, support his position
and may almost be said to paraphrase his words. For according to a
writer who ranks second to none in the science of ethnology, the
severest and most recent investigations show that "not only do
acknowledged facts permit the assumption of the unity of the human
species, but this opinion is attended with fewer discrepancies, and has
greater inner consistency than the opposite one of specific
diversity."[2-1] And as to the religions of heathendom, the view of
Saint Paul is but expressed with a more poetic turn by a distinguished
living author when he calls them "not fables, but truths, though clothed
in a garb woven by fancy, wherein the web is the notion of God, the
ideal of reason in the soul of man, the thought of the Infinite."[2-2]
Inspiration and science unite therefore to bid us dismiss the effete
prejudice that natural religions either arise as the ancient
philosophies taught, or that they are, as the Dark Ages imagined, subtle
nets of the devil spread to catch human souls. They are rather the
unaided attempts of man to find out God; they are the efforts of the
reason struggling to define the infinite; they are the expressions of
that "yearning after the gods" which the earliest of poets discerned in
the hearts of all men. Studied in this sense they are rich in teachings.
Would we estimate the intellectual and aesthetic culture of a people,
would we generalize the laws of progress, would we appreciate the
sublimity of Christianity, and read the seals of its authenticity: the
natural conceptions of divinity reveal them. No mythologies are so
crude, therefore, none so barbarous, but deserve the attention of the
philosophic mind, for they are never the empty fictions of an idle
fancy, but rather the utterances, however inarticulate, of an immortal
and ubiquitous intuition.
These considerations embolden me to approach with some confidence even
the aboriginal religions of America, so often stigmatized as incoherent
fetichisms, so barren, it has been said, in grand or beautiful
creations. The task bristles with difficulties. Carelessness,
prepossessions, and ignorance have disfigured them with false colors and
foreign additions without number. The first maxim, therefore, must be to
sift and scrutinize authorities, and to reject whatever betrays the
plastic hand of the European. For the religions developed by the red
race, not those mixed creeds learned from foreign invaders
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