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19 train of consequences that it has transmitted to us depend, like primitive mythology, upon the state of our intelligence. It is, after all, the intellect that ultimately directs and determines the main current of the varying and tortuous stream of the world's history.

Early philosophy, then, and early religion were at first one. Such a union in later times tends indeed to produce, in the words of Lord Bacon, "an heretical religion and a fantastic philosophy." But, in an early stage of mental development, the combination is one which we are prepared to expect. Whether or not there may have been a still more rudimentary and homogeneous form than any with which we are acquainted, I am not now concerned to inquire. At all events, at the first dawn of our historical knowledge a differentiation is apparent, and we perceive two forms of this combination. In their philosophical aspect these forms represented, the one the natural philosophy, the other the biology of our forefathers. In their religious aspect, the one was the mythical, or heroic, or Olympian religion; the other was the domestic religion, the religion of the hearth and of daily life. It is of this latter religion—the earlier in point of time, the more effective in its moral element, and the more influential in determining the growth of institutions and the general course of events—that I now propose to treat.

§ 2. Nothing was farther from the minds of archaic men than the notion that all men were of one blood, and were the creatures of an All-Father in Heaven. The universal belief of the early world was, that men were of different bloods; that they each had fathers of their own; and that these fathers were not in Heaven, but beneath the earth. They had a strong and practical conviction that they lived under a Divine protection; that this protection extended to