Page:Myth, Ritual, and Religion (Volume 1).djvu/362

340 Cahrocs, Ahts, and Melanesians. But at all times the undying savage in the soul of man has been quick to revive and to reassert itself in myth. Spiritual philosophies die and decay, and in their twilight the earliest and the rudest creeds, "spiritualism," polytheism, fetishism, mystic mummery and magic, again and again reappear. They creep out from the huts of peasants, and from the battered fanes of half-forgotten rural gods; and from dark corners of the soul they return to life, as in the time of Porphyry and Plotinus, or as in the ritual rubbish of the Brahmanas, or in the witch-trials of the Middle and Modern Ages. Man can never be certain that he has expelled the savage from his temples and from his heart; yet even the lowest known savages, in hours of awe and of need, lift their hands and their thoughts to their Father and to ours, who is not far from any one of us.