672 ECCLESIASTICAL INSTITUTIONS. 



age.&quot; Similarly, the Eev. Samuel Smith, after &quot;twenty- 

 eight years almost daily contact&quot; with such, says of a deaf- 

 mute, &quot; he has no idea of his immortal nature, and it has not 

 been found in a single instance, that an uneducated deaf- 

 mute has had any conception of the existence of a Supreme 

 Bem&amp;lt;? as the Creator and Euler of the universe.&quot; 



O 



The implication is that civilized men have no innate 

 tendency to form religious ideas ; and this implication is 

 supported by proofs that among various savages religious 

 ideas do not exist. Sir John Lubbock has given many of 

 these in his Prehistoric Times and his Origin of Civilization ; 

 and others may be added. Thus of a Wedda, who, when in 

 jail received instruction, Mr. Hartshorne writes &quot; he had no 

 idea of a soul, of a Supreme Being, or of a future state.&quot; 

 Concerning an African race Heuglin says &quot; the Dor do not 

 seem to have religious conceptions properly so called, but 

 they believe in spirits.&quot; We learn from Schweinfurth that 

 &quot; the Bongo have not the remotest conception of immortality. 

 . . . All religion, in our sense of the word religion, is quite 

 unknown to the Bongo.&quot; It is true that in such cases there 

 is commonly a notion, here distinct and there vague, of some 

 thing supernatural associated with the dead. While now, in 

 answer to a question, asserting that death brings annihilation, 

 the savage at another .time shows great fear of places where 

 the dead are: implying either a half-formed idea that the 

 dead will suddenly awake, as a sleeper does, or else some 

 faint notion of a double. Not even this notion exists in all 

 cases ; as is well shown by Sir Samuel Baker s conversation 

 with a chief of the Latooki a Nile tribe. 



&quot; Have you no belief in a future existence after death ? . . 

 bommoro (log.). Existence after death ! How can that be? Can a 



dead man get out of his grave unless we dig him out? 



* Do you think man is like a beast, that dies and is ended ? 

 Commoro. * Certainly ; an ox is stronger than a man ; but he dies, 



and his bones last longer ; they are bigger. A mail s bones break 



quickly he is weak. 



