CONVERSION AMONG THE FEEJEEANS. 433 



and so treacherous, that members of the same family dare 

 not trust each other ; and, in harmony with these charac- 

 teristics, they have for their aboriginal god, a serpent. Is 

 it not clear then, that these violent emotions which the 

 missionaries describe, these terrors and agonies of despair 

 which they rejoiced over, were nothing but the worship of 

 the old god under a new name ? Is it not clear that these 

 Feejees had simply understood those parts of the Christian 

 creed which agree in spirit with their own — the vengeance, 

 the perpetual torments, the diabolism of it; that these, 

 harmonizing with their natural conceptions of divine rule, 

 were realized by them vdih extreme vividness ; and that 

 the extremity of the fear which made them " literally roar 

 for hours together," arose from the fact that while they 

 could fully take in and believe the punitive element, the 

 merciful one was beyond their comprehension ? This is 

 the obvious inference. And it carries with it the further 

 one, that in essence their new belief was merely their old 

 one under a new form — the same substantial conception 

 with a different history and different names. 



However great, therefore, may be the seeming change 

 adventitiously produced in a people's religion, the anthro- 

 pomorphic tendency prevents it from being other than a 

 superficial change — insures such modifications of the new 

 religion as to give it all the potency of the old one — ob- 

 scures whatever higher elements there may be in it until 

 the people have reached the capability of being acted upon 

 by them ; and so, re-establishes the equilibrium between 

 the impulses and the control they need. If any one re- 

 quires detailed illustrations of this, he will find them in 

 abundance in the history of the modifications of Christian- 

 ity throughout Europe. 



Ceasing then to regard heathen theologies from the 

 personal point of view, and considering them solely with 

 reference to the function they fulfil where they are indige- 

 19 



