Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 1, 1890.djvu/396

 390 are knit to their worshippers by strong bonds of kinship, there religion in the true sense of the word begins.” That is an attractive picture, but it scarcely answers to what we know of savage practice and feeling about the higher beings. It does not answer, for the matter of that, to the feeling of the majority of men who are not savages. And it is met by the further difficulty of the facts of magic which are certainly worship, and are as certainly dominated by fear. To this Prof. Smith objects that magic is never religion nor its source. But surely its simplest explanation is that it is the survival of an older religion, and its gloomy aspect is due to its antinomianism with regard to the later and generally purer creed.

Another obstacle that stands in the way of Prof. Smith’s theory is the fact of human sacrifice. That cannot be a common meal of god and worshippers, and accordingly Prof. Smith has to make the most ingenious hypotheses to explain the late origin of human sacrifices among the Semites, among whom it certainly existed. But if ever a practice bore on the face of it the marks of primitiveness it is that of human sacrifice, and its existence stands in the way of the loving reverence for a kindred god postulated by Prof. Smith’s theory.

Finally, it would not be impossible to explain away much of the crucial significance attached by Prof. Smith to Nilus’s account of the morning rites of the Sinaitic Arabs. Thus the importance attached to the completion of the sacrificial meal between the rising and disappearance of the day-star seems to point to some form of astral worship which we know to have been current among the Northern Arabs. And even with regard to the blood-drinking, I notice an important discrepancy in Prof. Smith’s account. On p. 263, the flesh was eaten “half raw, and merely softened over the fire”. On p. 320, the company “hack off pieces and devour them raw”; in the former case the significance of blood is practically nil.

Thus altogether for these reasons I cannot consider that