PAGE X-NOTICES OF BOOKS:-SAYCE'S LECTURES ON PHILOLOGY; DE SAULCY'S NUMISMATICS OF NEOUS 155 THE THEOLOGICAL REVIEW. No. XLVIII-JANUARY, 1875. I. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THEISM. A GLANCE at the world acquaints us with the prevalence of worship, consequently of some conception of Deity, in human society. We cannot indeed say what used to be said, what Plutarch and Cicero so confidently affirmed, that belief in God is found wherever man is found. A better-informed ethnology contradicts that assertion. There are certainly peoples in whose life, if travellers report them truly, this element is altogether wanting. The natives of the valley of La Plata and of Paraguay, according to Azara, were entirely destitute of any religious beliefs or rites when he travelled among them. The missionaries who visited those tribes, supposing that they must have some sort of religion, took for idols the figures carved upon their pipes and bowls, and burned those implements accordingly. Others, seeing them beat the air on the appearance of the new moon, imagined that they worshiped that luminary. "But the positive fact is," says Azara, "that they worship nothing in the world, and have absolutely no religion."* According to Crantz, the Greenlanders had no religious ceremonies, and exhibited no sign of religious life. Schoolcraft describes the Camanches as equally godless. Sir John Lubbock has accumulated a mass of testimony. to the same effect from travellers in regions inhabited by See "Voyages," II. pp. 3 and 137. Quoted by Schelling, Philosophie d. Mythologie, p. 73. savage tribes. M. Bik inquired of the Arafuras what power they invoked in time of need when their fishing vessels were overtaken by storm and no human aid could save. The answer was, that they knew not on whom to call in such straits. Did he know? and would he be so good as to inform them? The Zulu chief when he heard of God would transfix him with his spear. "And yet this was a man whose judgment on other subjects would command attention." Very pathetic is the Kaffir's confession: "I asked myself, Who has touched the stars with his hands? on what hills do they rest? The waters are never weary; they know no other law than to flow without ceasing from morning till night and from night till morning; but where do they rest, and who makes them flow? The clouds come and go, and burst in water over the earth; whence come they, and who sends them? . . . I cannot see the wind; what is it, and who makes it blow? . . . Do I know how the corn sprouts? Yesterday there was not a blade in my field; to-day I returned and found some. Who can have given to the earth the wisdom and the power to produce it? Then I buried my face in both my hands." These exceptions do not disprove an innate tendency to worship in man; they only shew that this tendency is not always active, that certain conditions are required for its manifestation. Its state of abeyance in the South American savage no more disproves its existence in him, than its state of suspension disproves its existence in the secularist or unbeliever of Christian lands. Still Cicero's assertion that no people is so rude as not to have some notion of Deity, must be taken with this qualification, that religion is usually found in the savage state, and always in civil society. We may say, then, that belief in Deity is natural to man, is one of the primary forces of the soul. The origin of this belief is a question of wide dispute. The "fecit timor" of the atheist poet, the "notio insita" of Cicero, the original-revelation theory of Cudworth and later divines, represent the range of opinion concerning it. Hume was the first to distinguish between the "foundation in reason" and the "origin in human nature" of the idea of God.* He * Natural History of Religion, Introduction. supposes polytheism to have preceded monotheism in the course of human development. And this supposition is confirmed by ethnological research. On the other hand, a not unreasonable prejudice in Christian lands has leaned to the opposite view. Reasoning from our idea of God and the seeming necessities of human nature, one might presume that the Being of whom the knowledge is so essential would make Himself known to man in the beginning, that this knowledge would enter into nature's dower, would form a part of the primal outfit of human kind. And such has been the presumption of most Christian writers who have treated this topic prior to Hume. They have held that the first of mankind were endowed with this saving knowledge; that a revelation of the Godhead was made to original man, which soon waxed dim, was gradually perverted and finally lost; that all polytheisms, Indian, Phenician, Grecian and others, are disintegrations and corruptions of an aboriginal monotheism. To this hypothesis there are grave objections, not to speak of the a-priori difficulty of supposing that so essential a good once possessed could be lost to all but a fraction of the human race. A revelation which could be so easily forfeited must have been quite inadequate; and if thus inadequate, why bestowed? Why did not the God who gave it, maintain it, or immediately replace it when lost? Polytheism is no more deducible from monotheism by division and dissolution of unity, than monotheism, as some have maintained, is derivable from polytheism by concentration and absorption of the many into one. Each has its own independent origin. Certain it is that history knows nothing of the primal revelation which this theory affirms. History finds men in the earliest ages which its scrutiny has yet reached possessed with the crudest conceptions of Godhead,-the earlier, the cruder, the farther from the truth. It finds savage tribes or incipient nations involved in thick midnight or spiritual ignorance, blindly feeling after something divine. And yet if we inquire whence the thought, the presentiment of anything divine to feel after, we shall have to admit some innate impression, some dim instinctive sense of Deity, antecedent to even the most imbecile groping after God. So much must be conceded in order to account for the first and |