Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/28

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dear to children," and gives many examples of its adoption by savages. It points to one of the analogies we have suggested as existing. Let us see whether the analogy does not go further. In the life of a child there is a long time previous to birth and a short time after birth of apparently absolute unconsciousness. So there was probably a time in the early history of man when he had not formed any religious idea whatever. The child presently becomes conscious of the existence of beings, friendly rather than hostile, to whom he can communicate his wants by means of cries. These beings either give him what he cries for, in which case he generalises that he can always get what he wants if he cries loud and long enough, and that is magic ; or they do not give him what he cries for, but give him something else, in which case he learns the advantage of propitiating them, and that is religion. Both these operations can go on very well together, the nurse being coerced and the mother propitiated, or vice versa ; and this is what we find among the religions of savages.

We may now turn for a while to the writings of another honoured folklorist, my predecessor Mr. Andrew Lang. In his Making of Religion he collects together the evidences of the first dim surmises as to a Supreme Being, leading to belief in a kind of germinal Supreme Being among Australian and other savages. He offers no opinion as to the origin of their surmises and beliefs, but thinks it probable that as soon as man had the idea of making things, he might conjecture as to a Maker of things which he him- self had not made and could not make. He sums up the evidence as to Australian beliefs and ethics as follows : " A watchful being observes and rewards the conduct of men ; he is named with reverence, if named at all ; his abode is the heavens ; he is the Master and Lord of things ; his lessons soften the heart ;'' and Mr. Lang holds that " the religion patronised by the Australian Supreme Being, and inculcated in his mysteries, is actually used to