“Then you don’t believe in angekoks?” asked Rooney.
“No,” replied the Eskimo earnestly; “I don’t. I think they are clever scoundrels—clever fools. And more, I don’t believe in torngaks or any other spirits.”
“In that you are wrong,” said Rooney. “There is one great and good Spirit, who made and rules the universe.”
“I’m not sure of that,” returned the Eskimo, with a somewhat dogged and perplexed look, that showed the subject was not quite new to him. “I never saw, or heard, or tasted, or smelt, or felt a spirit. How can I know anything about it?”
“Do you believe in your own spirit, Okiok?”
“Yes, I must. I cannot help it. I am like other men. When a man dies there is something gone out of him. It must be his spirit.”
“Then you believe in other men’s spirits as well as your own spirit,” said Rooney, “though you have never seen, heard, tasted, smelt, or felt them?”
For a moment the Eskimo was puzzled. Then suddenly his countenance brightened.
“But I have felt my own,” he cried. “I have felt it moving within me, so that it made me act. My legs and arms and brain would not go into action if they were dead, if the spirit had gone out of them.”
“In the very same way,” replied the seaman, “you may feel the Great Spirit, for your own spirit could not go into action so as to cause your body to act unless a greater Spirit had given it life. So also we may feel or understand the Great Spirit when we look at the growing flowers, and hear the moving winds, and behold the shining stars, and feel the beating of our own hearts. I’m not much of a wise man, an angekok—which they would call scholar in my country—but I know enough to believe that it is only ‘the fool who has said in his heart, There is no Great Spirit.’”