Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/50

24 is not that of Kamilaroi or Kurnai. We do not, when we say "Our Father," think of an old man with a beard, like Baiame, encrusted in a throne of crystal. We have another notion of omniscience than that of a god informed by his messenger, or angel, "the All-seeing Spirit," though an all-seeing spirit is just the same as an omniscient one (Mrs. Langloh Parker, More Legendary Tales, p. 84). Yet the analogies are astonishing, and, if Mungan-ngaur be the father of Tundun, who is the father of the Kurnai, Adam is our common father, and I refer Mr. Hartland to Luke iii. 38.

I do not despair of seeing Mr. Hartland, who now complains of my rhetorical insistence on these analogies, turning round and accounting for Christianity as a refined survival of Kurnai and similar beliefs. We shall then have Mr. Tylor regarding Baiamism as a savage perversion of Christianity, and Mr. Hartland regarding Christianity as a Græco-Hebraic revival of Baiamism.

As to this question of borrowing (which, if conceded, is not useful to Mr. Hartland's case against me), I must quote my critic textually. After citing Mr. Ridley's account of Baiame as Creator, as the Being who welcomes the souls of dead blacks into Paradise, and destroys the bad, Mr. Hartland goes on (Folk-Lore, p. 302): "And his name is said to be derived from baia, to make, cut out, or build. But this account must surely be received with very great caution. There is evidence—negative evidence, it is true, but of persons in a position to be well informed—that Baiame, if known at all by that name, was not so prominent a figure in the beliefs of the natives until about sixty years ago, and that, at all events, what Dr. Tylor justly calls the 'markedly