mystical Brahmanist philosophy are hardly worshipped in actual practice at all, every community and every house has its own particular gods and its own special cult of its little domestic altar.

The first Englishman," says Sir William Hunter, "who tried to study the natives as they actually are, and not as the Brahmans described them, was struck by the universal prevalence of a worship quite distinct from that of the Hindu deities. A Bengal village has usually its local god, which it adores either in the form of a rude unhewn stone, or a stump, or a tree marked with red-lead. Some times a lump of clay placed under a tree does duty for a deity, and the attendant priest, when there is one, generally belongs to one of the half-Hinduized low-castes. The rude stone represents the non-Aryan fetich; and the tree seems to owe its sanctity to the non-Aryan belief that it forms the abode of the ghosts, or gods, of the village."

Omitting the mere guess-work about the fetich and the gratuitous supposition, made out of deference to the dying creed of Max Müllerism, that ancestor-worship must necessarily be a "non-Aryan" feature, this simple description shows us the prevalence all over India of customs essentially similar to those in Central Africa and in the Chinese provinces.

The Roman religion, in somewhat the same way, separates itself at once into a civic or national and a private or family cult. There were the great gods, native or adopted, whom the State worshipped publicly, as the Central African tribes worship the chief's ancestors; and there were the Lares and Penates, whom the family worshipped at its own hearth, and whose very name shows them to have been in origin and essence ancestral spirits. And as the real or practical Hindu religion consists mainly of offering up rice, millet, and ghee to the little local and family deities or to the chosen patron god in the Brahmanist pantheon, so, too, the real or practical Roman religion consisted mainly of sacrifice done at the domestic altar to the special Penates, farre pio et saliente mica.

I will not go on to point out in detail how Professor Sayce similarly finds ancestor-worship and Shamanism (a low form of ghost-propitiation) at the root of the religion of the ancient Accadians; how other observers have performed the same task for the Egyptians and Japanese; and how like customs have been traced among Greeks and Amazulu, among Hebrews and

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Nicaraguans, among early English and Digger Indians, among our Aryan ancestors themselves and Andaman Islanders. Every recent narrative of travel abounds with examples. Of Netherland Island I read, The skulls of their ancestors were treasured for gods;" of the New Hebrides, "The people worshipped the spirits of their ancestors. They prayed to them, over the kava-bowl, for health and pros"Their perity." In New Caledonia, gods were their ancestors, whose relics they kept up and idolized. At Tana, "The general name for gods seemed to be aremha; that means a dead man, and hints," says the Rev. George Turner, with refreshing frankness," alike at the origin and nature of their religious worship. When the chief prayed, he offered up yam and fruits, saying, "Compassionate father, here is some food for you; eat it. Be kind to us on account of it." Those who wish to see the whole of the evidence marshalled in battle array have only to turn to the first volume of Mr. Herbert Spencer's Principles of Sociology, where they will find abundant examples from all times and places gathered together in a vast and ovewhelming phalanx.

What concerns me here a little more is to call attention to the fact that even in Christianity itself the same primitive element survives as the centre of all that is most distinctively religious, as opposed to theological, in the Christian religion.

It is the universal Catholic custom to place the relics of saints or martyrs under the altars in churches. Thus the body of St. Mark the Evangelist lies under the high altar of St. Mark's, at Venice; and in every other Italian cathedral, or chapel, a reliquary is deposited within the altar itself. So well understood is this principle in the Latin Church, that it has hardened into the saying, "No relic, no altar." The sacrifice of the mass takes place at such an altar, and is performed by a priest in sacrificial robes. The entire Roman Catholic ritual is a ritual derived from the earlier sacerdotal ideas of ministry at an altar, and its connection with the primitive form is still kept up by the necessary presence of human remains in its holy places.

Furthermore, the very idea of a church itself is descended from the early Christian meeting-places in the catacombs or at the tombs of the martyrs, which are universally allowed to have been the primitive

Christian altars.

We know now that the cruciform dome-covered plan of Christian churches is derived from these early meeting-places at the junction of lanes or alleys in the catacombs; that the nave, chancel, and transepts indicate the crossing of the alleys, while the dome represents the hollowed-out portion or rudely circular vault where the two lines of archway intersect. The earliest dome-covered churches were attempts, as it were, to construct a cata comb above ground for the reception of the altar tomb of a saint or martyr. Similarly with the chapels that open out at the side from the aisles or transepts. Etymologically, the word chapel is the modernized form of capella, the arched sepulchre excavated in the walls of the catacombs, before the tomb in which it was usual to offer up prayer and praise. The chapels built out from the aisles in Roman churches, each with its own altar and its own saintly relics, are attempts to reproduce above ground in the same way the original sacred places in the early Christian excavated cemeteries.

Thus Christianity itself is linked on to the very antique custom of worship at tombs, and the habit of ancestor-worship by altars, relics, and invocation of saints, even revolutionary Protestantism still retaining some last faint marks of its origin in the dedication of churches to particular evangelists or martyrs, and in the more or less disguised survival of altar, priesthood, sacrifice and vestments.

Now, I don't say ancestor-worship gives us the whole origin of everything that is included in Christian English minds in the idea of religion. I don't say it accounts for all the cosmologies and cosmogonies of savage, barbaric, or civilized tribes. Those, for the most part, are pure mythological products, explicable mainly, I believe, by means of the key with which Mr. Andrew Lang supplies us; and one of them, adopted into Genesis from an alien source, has come to be accepted by modern Christendom as part of that organized body of belief which forms the Christian creed, though not in any true sense the Christian religion. Nor do I say that ancestor-worship gives us the origin of those ontological, metaphysical, or mystical conceptions which form part of the philosophy or theology of many priesthoods. Religions as we generally get them envisaged for us nowadays, are held to include

the mythology, the cosmogony, the ontology, and even the ethics of the race that practices them. These extraneous developments, however, I hold to spring from different roots and to have nothing necessarily in common with religion proper. If we have once accounted for the origin of ghosts, gods, tombs, altars, temples, churches, worship, sacrifice, priesthoods, and ceremonies, then we have accounted for all that is essential and central in religion, and may hand over all the rest--the tales, stories, and pious legends-to the account of comparative mythology or of the yet unfounded science of comparative idealogy.

Once more, I don't wish to insist, either, that every particular individual god, national or naturalistic, must necessarily represent a particular ghost-the dead spirit of a single definite once-living person. It is enough to show, as Mr. Spencer has shown, that the idea of the god, and the worship paid to a god, are directly derived from the idea of the ghost, and the offerings made to the ghost, without necessarily holding, as Mr. Spencer seems to hold, that every god is and must be in ultimate analysis the ghost of a particular human being. Once the conception of gods had been evolved by humanity, and had become a common part of every man's imagined universe-of the world as it presented itself to the mind of the percipient

then it was natural enough that new gods should be made from time to time out of abstractions or special aspects and powers of nature, and that the same worship should be paid to such new-made and purely imaginary gods as had previously been paid to the whole host of gods evolved from personal and tribal ancestors. It is the first step that costs: once you have got the idea of a god fairly evolved, any number of extra gods may be invented or introduced from all quarters. A great pantheon readily admits new members from many strange sources. Familiar instances in the best-known pantheon are those of Concordia, Pecunia, Aius, Locutius, Rediculus Tutanus. The Romans, indeed, deified every conceivable operation of nature or of human life; they had gods or goddesses for the minutest details of agriculture, of social relations, of the first years of childhood, of marriage and domestic arrangements generally. Many of their deities were obviously manufactured

to meet a special demand on special occasions. But at the same time, none of these gods, so far as we can see, could ever have come to exist at all if the ghosttheory and ancestor-worship had not already made familiar to the human mind the principles and practice of religion generally. The very idea of a god would not otherwise have been evolved; though, when once evolved, any number of new beings could readily be affiliated upon it by the human imagination.

Still, to admit that other elements have afterward come in to confuse religion, is quite a different thing from admitting that religion itself has more than one origin. Whatever gives us the key to the practice of worship gives us the key to real religion. Now, one may read through almost any books of the mythological school without ever coming upon a single word that throws one ray of light upon the origin of religion itself thus properly called. To trace the development of this, that, or the other story or episode is in itself a very valuable study in human evolution: but no amount of tracing such stories ever gives us the faintest clew to the question why men worshipped Osiris, Zeus, Siva, or Venus; why they offered up prayer and praise to Isis, or to Artemis; why they made sacrifices to Capitolian Jove at Rome, or slew turtle-doves on the altar of Jahweh, god of Israel, at Jerusalem. The ghost-theory and the practice of ancestorworship show us a natural basis and genesis for all these customs, and explain them in a way to which no mythological enquiry can add a single item of fundamental in

terest.

It may be well to attempt some slight provisional disentanglement of the various extraneous elements which interweave themselves at last with the simple primitive fabric of practical religion.

In the first place, there is the mythological element. The mythopoeic faculty is a reality in mankind. Stories arise, grow, gather episodes with movement, transform and transmute themselves, wander far in space, get corrupted by time, in ten thousand ways suffer change and modification. Now, such stories connect themselves sometimes with living men and women. Everybody knows how many myths exist even in our own day about every prominent or peculiar person. They also gather more particularly round the memory of

the dead, and especially of any very distinguished dead man or woman. Sometimes they take their rise in genuine tradition, sometimes they are pure fetches of fancy or of the romancing faculty. The ghosts or the gods are no less exempt from these mythopoeic freaks than other people; and as gods go on living indefinitely, they have time for plenty of myths to gather about them. In some cases, myths demonstrably older than a particular human being-say Cæsar, Virgil, Arthur, Charlemagne-get fitted by later ages to those special personalities. The same thing may often happen with gods. Myth comes at last, in short, to be the history of the gods; and a personage about whom many myths exist, whether real or imaginary, a personification of nature or an abstract quality, may grow in time to be practically a divine being, and to receive worship, the final test of divinity.

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Again, myths about the gods come in the long run, in many cases, to be written down, especially by the priests, and themselves acquire a considerable degree of adventitious holiness. Thus we get Sacred Books; and in most advanced races, the sacred books tend to become an important integral part of religion, and a test of the purity of tenets or ceremonial. cred books almost always contain rude cosmological guesses and a supernatural cosmogony, as well as tales about the doings, relationships, and prerogatives of the gods. Such early philosophical conjectures come then to be intimately bound up with the idea of religion, and in many cases even to supersede in certain minds its true, practical, central kernel. The extreme of this tendency is seen in English Protestant Dissenting Bibliolatry.

Rationalistic and reconciliatory glosses tend to arise with advancing culture. Attempts are made to trace the pedigree and mutual relations of the gods, and to get rid of discrepancies in earlier legends. The Theogony of Hesiod is a definite effort undertaken in this direction for the Greek pantheon. Often the attempt is made by the most learned and philosophicallyminded among the priests, and results in a quasi-philosophical mythology like that of the Brahmans. In the monotheistic or half-monotheistic religions, this becomes theology. In proportion as it grows more and more labored and definite, the attention of the learned and the priestly class is

more and more directed to dogma, creed, faith, abstract formulæ of philosophical or intellectual belief, and less and less to ritual or practice. But the popular religion remains usually, as in India, a religion of practical custom and observances, having very little relation to the highly abstract theological ideas of the learned or the priestly.

Lastly, in the highest religions, a large element of ethics, of sentiment, of broad humanitarianism, of perverted emotion, is allowed to come in, often to the extent of obscuring the original factors of practice and observance. We are constantly taught that real religion" means many things which have nothing on earth to do with religion proper, in any sense, but are merely high morality, tinctured by emotional devotion toward a spiritual being or set of beings.

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Owing to all these causes, modern investigators, in searching for the origin of religion, are apt to mix up with it, even when dealing with savage tribes, many extraneous questions of cosmology, cosmogony, philosophy, metaphysics, ethics, and mythology. They do not sufficiently see that the true question narrows itself down at last to two prime factors-worship and sacrifice. In all early religions, the practice is at a maximum, and the creed at a minimum. We, nowadays, look back upon these early cults, which were cults

and little else, with minds warped by modern theological prejudices-by constant wrangling over dogmas, clauses, definitions, and formularies. We talk glibly of the Hindu faith or the Chinese belief, when we ought rather to talk of the Hindu practice or the Chinese observances. By thus wrongly conceiving the nature of religion, we go astray as to its origin. We shall only get right again when we learn to separate mythology entirely from religion, and when we recognize that the growth and development of the myth have nothing at all to do with the beginnings of worship. The science of comparative mythology and folk-lore is a valuable and light-bearing study in its own way but it has no more to do with the origin of religion than the science of ethics or the science of geology. There are ethical rules in most advanced cults; there are geological surmises in most sacred books; but neither one nor the other are on that account religion, any more than the history of Jehoshaphat or the legend of Samson.

These are only, I admit, very brief and hasty hints on a great subject. If I were a Giffard Reader, or a Hibbert Lecturer, I would work them out in detail with illustrative examples. As I am not, I can only write a review article about them. But what I want to suggest sums itself up in one sentence thus: Religion is practice, mythology is talk.-Fortnightly Review.