256 THE GENESIS OF IDOL ATE Y. 



not believe that Fetisliisni is the parent of idolatry ; but rather 

 as I have said elsewhere that it is the dregs and remnants 

 of idolatr}^ The idolatrous nations now, as always, are not 

 the savage nations : but those who profess a very ancient and 

 decaying civilization. The Hebrew Scriptures uniformly 

 represent the non-idolatrous and monotheistic peoples, from 

 Abraham to Cvrus, as lower in what we now call the scale 

 of civilization, than the idolatrous and polytheistic peoples 

 about them. May not the contrast between the Patriarchs 

 and the Pharaohs, David and the Philistines, tlie Persians 

 and the Babylonians, mark a law of history of wider applica- 

 tion than we are wont to suspect ? But if so, what was the 

 parent of idolatry ? For a natural genesis it must have had, 

 whether it be a healthy and necessary development of the 

 human mind as some hold, not without w^eighty arguments 

 on their side; or wdiether it be a diseased and merely 

 funci'oid growth, as I believe it to be. I cannot hold that it 

 originated in Xature-w^orship, simply because I can find no 

 evidence of such an origin. There is rather evidence, if the 

 statements of the idolaters themselves are to be taken, that it 

 originated in the worship of superior races by inferior races ; 

 possibly also in the w^orship of works of art which those 

 races, dviiio- out, had left behind them, and which the lower 

 race, while unable to copy them, believed to be possessed of 

 magical powers derived from a civilization which they 



