MAN. . 109 
Grimm, and others. In short, the majority of independ- 
ent and unprejudiced students of heathen beliefs, from the 
days of A. W. v. Schlegel to our own, have reached the 
conclusion, that all religions in their later stages exhibit 
a much lower conception of the Divinity than in their 
earlier form. It is only the hopelessly prejudiced who 
can say, as does John Fiske, that “to regard classic pagan- 
ism as one of the degraded remnants of a primeval mono- 
theism, is to sin against the canons of a sound inductive 
philosophy.” Sinning against the consonant testimony of 
universal history is a venial offense, it would seem, when 
the integrity of this “sound inductive philosophy”—that 
is, of the Spencerian theory—is at stake. It needs but 
a glance at the well-known facts of religious history to 
show the working of this Law of Decay as influencing 
the development of every system of ethnic belief which 
has a recorded history or a literature. 
The workings of this law can be traced even in the case 
of the savage tribes of our own day. Of the African 
negroes, P. Baudin says that “their traditions and relig- 
ious doctrines . . . show clearly that they are a people in 
decadence. . . . They have an obscure and confused idea 
of the only God, . . . . who no longer receives worship.” 
(‘‘Fetichism,’ p. 7-10.) Winwood Reade testifies: “The 
negroes possess the remnants of a noble and sublime re- 
ligion, though they have forgotten its precepts and de- 
based its ceremonies.” They still retain a recollection 
“of God, the Supreme, the Creator.’ Concerning the 
Zulus, Bastian records that they informed him that 
“their ancestors possessed the knowledge of ... . that 
source of being which is above, which gives life to men.”’ 
(“Vorgeschichtliche Schoepfungslieder.”) A missionary 
of the Lutheran General Synod, Rev. J. C. Pedersen, 
wrote in “Lutheran Observer,” August, 1910, concerning 
the African natives that they still have a considerable 
