XII. Religion.
Religion is intimately mixed with every one of these aforementioned sociological aspects of family, rights of property, authority, tribal organization, judicial trials, punishments, intertribal relations, and commerce.
Mr. R. E. Dennett, residing in Loango, has made a careful and philosophic investigation into the religious ideas of the Ba-Vili or Fyât nation and adjacent tribes bordering on the Kongo. The result of his research shows that the native tribal government and religious and social life are inseparably united. He claims to have discovered a complex system of “numbers” and “powers” showing the Loango people to be more highly organized politically than are the equatorial tribes, and revealing a very curious co-relation of those “numbers,” governing the physical, rational, and moral natures, with conscience and with God.
Some traces of the “numbers with meanings” are found in Yoruba, where, as described by Mr. Dennett, the division of the months of the year, the names of lower animals typical of the senses, and the powers of earth that speak to us represent religious ideas and relations. They err, therefore, who, as superficial observers, would brush away all these native views as mere superstition. They are more than mere superstition; though indeed very superstitious, they point to God.
The particular exponent of religious worship, the fetich, governs the arrangements of all such relations. It will be discussed as to its origin and the details of its use in the subsequent chapters.
CHAPTER II
THE IDEA OF GOD—RELIGION
Missionary Paul of Tarsus, in the polite exordium of his great address to the Athenian philosophers on Mars Hill, courteously tells them that he believes them to be a very “religious” people,—indeed, too much so in their broad-church willingness to give room for an altar to the worship of any new immanence of God; and then, with equal courtesy, he tells them that, with all their civilization, with all their eminence in art and philosophy, they were ignorant of the true character of a greater than any deity in their pantheon.