could not entirely be obliterated. And the root-idea of all mythology-that the causes of everything that affects human life and welfare must be sought for in the agency of indwelling, willing powers, pursuing a fixed purpose, untrammelled by the limitations of the finite world, entirely free in their movements, and endowed with great magical power-this root-idea, at all events, dates from the ancient period.

This applies to cult no less than to doctrine. There we find sacrifices, accompanied by prayers, sacred sayings, and songs, to which magical power is attributed, and the magical observances which form the germ of all the symbolical and dramatic features of the later cult. There, too, we see the ever-burning fire, kindled and purified in accordance with ancient fashion. There already we encounter the belief that, by self-denial, abstinence, and mutilation, and especially by the use of intoxicants, one may attain to the higher life and the greater power of the spirits, and that certain privileged persons had received a special qualification for this. As yet there is no priesthood, but we meet with medicine-men, soothsayers, sorcerers, experts, who are consulted in their respective spheres, and in fact with the whole hierarchy in primitive form. There again, in the form of fetishes and shapeless images, we discern the precursors of the later idols, we see sacred places specially visited by spirits and soon declared inaccessible to the profanum vulgus, and we even find secret

societies, the members of which, by greater feats of self-control, dedicate themselves to closer communion with the spirits and become their special favourites.

And further, it is not merely the forms of worship, but the ideas which animate the more developed religions, that we meet with in the earliest period, though as yet in childlike, stammering utterances. The divine omnipotence is as yet a wonder-working power, unlimited by any human incapacity; the divine holiness is unapproachableness; the divine omnipresence is as yet but the power of moving from place to place in the twinkling of an eye. The ordeal and the oath, as conceived by Spiritism, already involve a belief in the gods as vindicators of truth and justice, and the dread of their punishment implies an awakened sense of guilt. The idea that, after all, there exists a certain unity in the countless multitude of spirits, an idea I have already alluded to, shows a glimmering of monotheism. Nor are the two fundamental thoughts of all religious doctrine, the superiority of the world of the gods to that of men, and the inter-relation of both, by any means lacking in these primitive religious forms.

Lastly, we may even discover here the rudiments of true piety. As with children, so with primitive man, his attitude towards the spirits shows a wavering between fear and familiarity, but also hope and trust, though mainly directed towards material blessings, and gratitude, though partly induced by the thought that

he must express it in order not to forfeit the future favour of his gods. These are but the buds, destined in the course of later development to burst into flower and to yield fruit. Yet even here religion possesses the feature characteristic of it, wherever it is a living reality, that of devotion, of adoration, which shrinks from no sacrifice, however burdensome, stanchly defends the adored object, and avenges it when insulted. Let us not therefore overlook the true piety which lurks in these defective, and to us often strange and repellent, forms.

Shall we then, conscious of the superiority of our religion, be ashamed of the humble origins from which it has sprung? Shall we not rather hail this religious disposition as a proof of man's higher origin, as a proof that the finite being partakes of the infinite and the eternal ? We might as well be ashamed of having been once helpless children, and of having, all of us, even the mightiest monarch and the greatest genius, only gradually grown up to self-consciousness and rational thought. Nor let us forget that the beginning is not the same thing as the origin. Religion too, like every human phenomenon, is governed by the all-embracing law of development-from the lower to the higher, from the natural to the spiritual. The tree must first be a sapling, and the sapling a seed; but in that seed lurks already embosomed the majestic tree with its wealth of foliage and its treasure of fruit.

LECTURE IV.

STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT-THE HIGHEST NATURE

RELIGIONS.

HAVING sketched the main features of the lowest nature - religions, let us now proceed to the higher. The period of myth-formation, with its unorganised polydæmonism and its magic rites, still under the domination of Animism, is succeeded by the period we call the mythological, in which an organised polytheism is established; the world of gods, now confined within definite limits, is more and more humanised, and the moral element thus ever more powerfully asserts its claims, without, however, as yet attaining supremacy over nature.

At the outset it is necessary to add a word of explanation to this short description.

We have advanced from myth - formation to mythology. But this does not necessarily imply that at this stage myth-making is entirely at an end.

Now and again a new myth arises, or at all events the old myths are modified, extended, subdivided, or applied to beings altogether different from those to which they once belonged; but the examples of new myths have become very rare, and, as I said in my former lecture, on closer examination they will be found to consist of old material moulded anew. The imagination no longer delights to busy itself with the creation of myths as an explanation of striking phenomena, or of those which affect human welfare-for people now begin to discover other and more rational explanations of them-but rather to transform them into poetical narratives of the world of the gods, or into miraculous traditions and legends of a bygone age of which no historic records survive. An attempt is also now made to interpret them in accordance, not with the original meaning, but with the needs and views of the time, and to build them up into a theogonic and cosmogonic system.

And now polydæmonism becomes polytheism. The difference between a demon, a spirit, and a god is not absolute. All the gods are indeed spirits, but all the spirits are not gods. They do not become so until they have acquired not only a definite name and fixed function, but a specific character, a personality, which clearly distinguishes them from other higher beings created by the poetic imagination or embodied in earthly form by the plastic art. These beings are