110 MAN. 
display of religion, but “ask him, who is the God in 
whom you trust? what do you mean by trusting? how 
can he help you? and he will answer, ‘I don’t know, but 
the old people used to say so, and taught us to say so,’ ” 
John Hanning Speke, in his “Journal of the Discovery of 
the Sources of the Nile’ records reminiscences among 
the degraded savages among whom he dwelt, of a su- 
preme God who dwells in heaven, but who no longer re- 
ceived worship. Mungo Park, in the diary of his 
“Travels in the Interior of Africa,’ says that the Mandin- 
goes, a degenerate race of fetish worshippers, still 
possessed the knowledge of one God, but do not offer up 
prayers and supplications to him. 
In the record of his famous circumnavigation of the 
globe, Captain Cook says that the cannibals of New Zea- 
land still acknowledged a superior being, although their 
religion was a crude system of spiritualistic practices. 
Concerning the Koreans Mrs. L. H. Underwood, 
medical missionary, says that a thousand unworthy dei- 
ties now crowd the temples, although the great universal 
Ruler is still worshipped at times, and the “ancient 
purity of faith and worship has become sadly darkened.” 
The foremost student of modern missions, Johann 
Warneck, in “The Living Christ and Dying Heathenism” 
(Ff. H. Revell Co.,) comes to the conclusion that the 
Christian religion and its monotheism are not only not a 
development from lower origins, but that the heathen 
religions, historically considered, are a degeneracy from 
a higher knowledge of God. In other words, the appli- 
cation of the doctrine of evolution to the field of com- 
parative religion is a mistake. “Any form of Animism 
known to me has no lines leading to perfection, but only 
incontestable marks of degeneration,’ says the author. 
“In heathenism the gold of the divine thought becomes 
dross.” 
