208 RELIGIOUS FEELING 



The worship of man by his fellow-man is and has been pre- 

 valent in all ages and in all countries, in all degrees or stages 

 of savagery, barbarism, and civilisation. In the first place, as 

 regards the savage, he worships, from different motives to a 

 certain extent, on the one hand his own chiefs, and on the other 

 the white man. A certain African tribe of the Nyanza region 

 ' believed most devotedly that the general affairs of life and 

 the control of the elements were in the hands of their old 

 chief; and therefore they served him, not with a feeling of 

 love, neither with a trace of religion, but .... for the sate 

 of what they could obtain' (Baker). 'The negroes of 

 Dahomey, as elsewhere in West Africa, considered white 

 men as beings but little inferior to deities ' (Ellis), and the 

 explanation of this is probably to be found in the statement 

 by another traveller that 'nothing impresses savages so 

 forcibly as the power to punish and reward ' (Baker) . Ac- 

 cording to Spencer, indeed, the savage first shows the re- 

 ligious sentiment ' in the feeling excited by the display of 

 power in another, exceeding his own power some skill, some 

 sagacity, in his chief, leading to a result he does not under- 

 stand something which has the element of mystery and 

 arouses his wonder. 9 Livingstone has described the worship 

 of the white traveller by various African races. ' The white 

 traveller commands a kind of worship. The sick lie down 

 in his shadow to be cured ; the young women ask permission 

 to touch his strange skin and his wonderful hair.' 1 Houzeau 

 points out that the deities of other primitive peoples, such 

 as the. Society Islanders, are also only men. 



But the recognition of brother man as a superior being 

 is by no means confined to savage races. Buddha, the 

 founder of the Buddhist religion, was himself worshipped as 

 a god, and the same was no doubt the case with Mahomet. 

 'At the close of a cholera epidemic in Ceylon, in 1875, 

 certain Buddhist priests from Burmah paraded through 

 Galle in 'a wheeled pagoda, 'the people adoring them as 

 gods ; ' 2 and the ' Deification of the Prince of Wales in 



1 'Athenaeum,' December 19, 1874, p. 822. 

 * Sunday Magazine,' November 1875, p. 143. 



