Nothing is more common in anti-Christian argument than the appeal to contemporary savages as examples of what Early Man was like. It is true that this cardinal doctrine, the close similarity of the modern savage with primitive man, having been turned against them, the materialists have recently been warning us against too close a parallel, and have begun repeating something we Christians talked of long ago (it ought to be obvious enough) that the savage has been at it just as long as we have, and that often he may have degraded rather than have risen. But they can’t have it both ways. They can’t use the savage to make out the origins of Man as abominable as possible, and then, when the savage gives evidence on our side, say that they won’t accept it.
Now the evidence from the savage in this respect is very remarkable. Not only is its general trend clear, but the more it is examined the stronger it becomes.
It is twofold. First, the very simple (and therefore, presumably, the very primitive) peoples are precisely those which have, as a rule (not always) the primary conception of a Universal God. That is true of the Pigmies, it is true of certain striking cases in Australasia; it seems less certain of the Esquimaux.
Secondly, when you get successive layers of culture, it is precisely the later layers in which this idea fades away, and local immediate gods begin to obscure it. The whole process has every appearance of being that of an original concept of a Universal God, later modified by particular tangible relations with immediate things, or, in plain words, Idolatry.
You get all the successive stages: The Supreme God still believed in, but regarded as indifferent; the Supreme God half-forgotten; the Supreme God wholly forgotten. They are like geological strata.
As an example of the way in which closer examination confirms this succession, I may take the case of the Andaman islanders and those who have observed them.
It was at first generally admitted, on the witness of an original observer, that these primitives held the idea of one Universal God. Then came a later observer who made his enquiries and decided that they had no such idea at all. Then came the careful scientific critic of this later observer (Andrew Lang), and showed, to the delight of all those who enjoy the comic, that the first witness spoke the language and lived intimately with the natives for years, while the second was a passing traveller who could not speak a word of it.
To all this add a third form of evidence. Primitive man, unless he was quite unlike contemporary savages, and unless his thought did not follow the ordinary rules of thinking, could not possibly turn a local God or deified chieftain or what not into the Universal God. That is a wholly gratuitous assumption born of modern academic speculation. In the actual practice of the mind the two things are quite apart.
When a statement is continually repeated and is also simple, it easily comes to be an accepted commonplace. We ought always to test such ambient ideas by close inspection, and this one of many gods coalescing with one God won’t hold water. Our minds do not generalize local attachments: they concentrate them.
They may extend the field of operation of such attachments, as when the patriotism of the city is extended to a nation or empire. But they remain fiercely exclusive. There is no “patriotism of the Universe.”