To reach a decision, I take the most unfavourable example which can be suggested,—the Australian Blacks. Considering their number and the extent of their territory, they were, when discovered, the most degraded people on the globe. They had nothing which could be called a government, and some dialects have no word for chief. None of them could count the fingers on one hand, for none of the dialects had any words for numerals beyond three or four. Mr. Hale, the eminent ethnographer, who was among them in 1843, says that they evinced “an almost brutal stupidity,” “downright childishness and imbecility.”[11]
Their natural feelings and moral perceptions seem incredibly blunted. I can best illustrate this by narrating an incident which happened at a frontier station, one of many of the same character.
The white family employed a native girl named Mattie about fifteen years old. She had a baby, which one day disappeared. On inquiry she stated that her mother had said that she was too young to take care of a baby, and had therefore cooked and eaten it with some of her cronies. Mattie cried in telling this. Because her baby had been killed? Oh no! but because her mother had given her none of the tidbits, but only the bones to pick![12]
Yet even these seemingly hopeless brutes have an intricate system of kinship and marriage laws, the most rigid of any known. Marriage with sisters or first cousins is not only forbidden, “It is not conceived as possible.” The prohibitions about food are so absolute that the natives would perish of hunger rather than break them. Some of their religious ceremonies entail voluntary mutilations of the most dreadful description. Their mythology is extensive, and I shall have frequent occasion to quote it. And so far are they from an obtuse indifference to the future and the past, an accurate observer who lived among them says: “They wonder among themselves and talk at night about these things, and the past existence of their race, and how they came here.”[13]
Savage tribes are distinctly unlettered. They belong in a stage of culture where the art of writing, as we understand it, is unknown. They have no bibles, no sacred books, by which to teach their religions. What means have we, therefore, to learn their opinions about holy things?
The question is one which demands an answer, the more because I shall often refer to the religions of tribes long since extinct, and whose very names are forgotten. How do we dare to speak with confidence of what they thought about the gods?
We can do so, and it is one of the marvels of modern scientific research, quite as admirable as its more familiar and practical results.
Our sources of information regarding primitive peoples may be classed under four titles, Archæology, Language, Folk-lore, and Ethnographic descriptions.
By the first of these, archæology, we become acquainted with the objective remains of beliefs long since extinguished. The temples, idols, and altars of dead gods reveal to us the attributes assigned to them by their votaries and the influences they were believed to exert. We can interpret their symbols, and from rude carvings re-construct the story of their divine struggles. Especially, from ancient sepulchres and the modes of disposal of the dead which they reveal, can we discern what hopes vanished nations held of a life to come.