Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/321

 Rh It is, first of all, desirable to be clear what it is he asserts. It is, as I understand, that one of the two chief sources of religion (the other being a belief in the soul, with which we have nothing to do here) was "the belief, how attained we know not, in a powerful, moral, eternal, omniscient Father and Judge of men." "From the most backward races historically known to us," we are told, "to those of our own status, all have been more or less washed by the waters of this double stream of religion." Elsewhere he speaks of a "Supreme Being," or a "relatively Supreme Being," of "the equal Father of all men," of "a universal Father and Maker," "a moral Creator," and so forth, as the earliest conception of God, or of a god known to us; or at least we are told that He "may be "—by which Mr. Lang desires to intimate his opinion that He was—"(though he cannot historically be shown to be) prior to the first notion of ghost and separable souls." The italics are mine.

Now, although in the passage quoted above the author professes ignorance how this conception was attained, he adds in a note: "the hypothesis of St. Paul seems not the most unsatisfactory." This hypothesis is that the belief in question arose out of the "Argument from Design" (p. 200). He holds, therefore, that "the most backward races historically known to us" had by reasoning arrived at the belief in a moral, eternal, omniscient Creator and Judge. The description applies particularly to the Australian aborigines, who seem to have been unconscious English Deists in paint and scars and feathers. On the antecedent improbability that naked savages, without any organised system of government, and incapable of counting up to seven, could have attained a philosophical conception so lofty, there is no need to argue. It is obvious that the theory demands cogent proof.

Mr. Lang begins by referring to the Fuegians and Patagonians, about whom our information is so extremely fragmentary that I will waste no words upon it. He then