Page:An analysis of religious belief (1877).djvu/658

 adds that among all the black nations he has known, there is none that has not this belief in God and that does not regard him as the author of the world. They call him by the same name as heaven, and it is even doubtful whether they do not take heaven for the supreme Being. "But perhaps," he adds, "they do not even think so definitely" (G. d. M., p. 318). So that the conception of the Highest God in the regions visited by this missionary is still vague and indefinite, like that we have found in Juda and in Natal.

If now we turn to another quarter of the globe we find the peculiarly degraded and ignorant Greenlanders asserting that, although they knew nothing of God before the arrival of the missionaries, yet that those of them who had reflected on the subject had perceived the necessity of creative power, and had inferred that there must be a being far superior to the cleverest man. They had, in fact, used the argument from design, and thus prepared, they had gladly believed in the God preached by the missionaries, for they found that it was he whom they had in their hearts desired to know (H. G., p. 240). A similar conviction of the existence of a supreme God prevailed in the new world when it was discovered by Europeans. Such a God was acknowledged in Mexico and Peru, as also in the less civilized regions of the North. Speaking of the American Indians, Charlevoix observes that nothing is more certain, yet nothing more obscure, than the idea which these savages have of a primæval Being. All agree in regarding him as the first Spirit, the Ruler and the Creator of the world; but when further pressed, they have nothing to offer but grotesque fancies, ill-considered fables, and undigested systems. Nearly all the Algonquin nations (he adds) call the first Spirit the Great Hare; some term him Michabou, and others Atahocan. He was apparently supposed by some to have been a kind of quadruped, and to have created the earth from a grain of sand drawn from the bottom of the ocean, and men from the dead bodies of animals (N. F., vol. iii. p. 343).

The great religions of the world have all of them (Buddhism alone excepted) acknowledged a God, whom they pictured to their minds in various ways according to the degree of their development and their powers of abstract thought. Dimly shad