To conclude this chapter, the study of savage and barbaric religions seems to yield the following facts:—
1. Low savages. No regular chiefs. Great beings, not in receipt of sacrifice, sanctioning morality. Ghosts are not worshipped, though believed in. Polytheism, departmental gods and gods of heaven, earth, sky and so forth, have not been developed or are not found.
2. Barbaric races. Aristocratic or monarchic. Ghosts are worshipped and receive sacrifice. Polytheistic gods are in renown and receive sacrifice. There is usually a supreme Maker who is, in some cases, moral, in others otiose. In only one or two known cases (as in that of the Polynesian Taaroa) is he in receipt of sacrifice.
3. Barbaric races. (Zulus, monarchic with Unkulunkulu; some Algonquins (feebly aristocratic) with Atahocan). Religion is mainly ancestor worship or vague spirit worship; ghosts are propitiated with food. There are traces of an original divine being whose name is becoming obsolescent and a matter of jest.
4. Early civilisations. Monarchic or aristocratic. (Greece, Egypt, India, Peru, Mexico.) Polytheism. One god tends to be supreme. Religiously regarded, gods are moral; in myth are the reverse. Gods are in receipt of sacrifice. Heavenly society is modelled on that of men, monarchic or aristocratic. Philosophic thought tends towards belief in one pure god, who may be named Zeus, in Greece.
5. The religion of Israel. Probably a revival and purification of the old conception of a moral, beneficent creator, whose creed had been involved in sacrifice and anthropomorphic myth.
In all the stages thus roughly sketched, myths of the lowest sort prevail, except in the records of the last stage, where the documents have been edited by earnest monotheists.
If this theory be approximately correct, man's earliest religious ideas may very well have consisted, in a sense, of dependence on a supreme moral being who, when attempts were made by savages to describe the modus of his working, became involved in the fancies of mythology. How this belief in such a being arose we have no evidence to prove. We make no hint at a sensus numinis, or direct revelation.
While offering no hypothesis of the origin of belief in a moral creator we may present a suggestion. Mr. Darwin says about early man: "The same high mental faculties which first led man to believe in unseen spiritual agencies, then in fetichism, polytheism and ultimately monotheism, would infallibly lead him, so long as his reasoning powers remained poorly developed, to various strange superstitions and customs".(1) Now, accepting Mr. Darwin's theory that early man had "high mental faculties," the conception of a Maker of things does not seem beyond his grasp. Man himself made plenty of things, and could probably conceive of a being who made the world and the objects in it. "Certainly there must be some Being who made all these things. He must be very good too," said an Eskimo to a missionary.(2) The goodness is inferred by the Eskimo from his own contentment with "the things which are made".(3)
(1) Darwin, Descent of Man, i. p. 66.