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beginning of religion in its end is a singular perversion of ideas. I cannot 
conceive how any one, looking on the facts as they are—and I may say that 
this essay has put the facts very moderately as they appear to tell against 
the progress upwards of the human race in regard to religion—can really 
imagine that religion is a mere development of physical force evolved by the 
ordinary processes which are imagined by a particular school to govern 
evolution. Of course, there isa very different sense in which we use the word 
“ Evolution.” One might call it, more strictly, development. There is the 
question of the development of religion, which is a most interesting study. 
It is, however, one we can hardly deal with without regarding it in the light 
of revealed history ; and, therefore, it hardly comes within our province 
to-night. But we cannot trace the source of the earlier dispensation without 
being struck with the fact that amid all the evil failure that marked their 
history there was a progress in the realisation of their religion among the 
Jews, of a kind which we do not notice in any other religion, for we do not 
find a progress upward rather than downward in any other religion. But, on 
the other hand, there is the point which the author of the paper puts most 
forcibly and which I think well worthy of careful thought. I cannot imagine 
any more powerful evidence for theism than the fact that there is that con- 
stant yearning for a higher and purer spiritual life which gives strength to 
all movements for reformation ; and that yet, in spite of this, there is also 
the undoubted counter tendency, dragging the human soul downwards, 
which the author has so vividly put before us. We cannot trace the 
history of the past without being deeply struck with this, and without 
tracing the history of the past we cannot justly and wisely deal with the 
history of the present. I hope that some of those present, who may have 
studied the subject more profoundly than I have, will now give us the benefit 
of their views upon it. (Applause.) 
Rey. F. A. WaLKer, D.D., F.L.S.—I have only risen to say a few words 
with reference to one statement which has been alluded to in the interesting 
paper we have before us, that alluding to a tribe said to have no con- 
ception of religion at all. I believe this may be the case with reference 
to certain of the African races. I was lately in conversation with the Bishop of 
Maritzburg, and may state that, in the course of a very interesting drawing- 
room lecture which he gave with regard to the mode of dealing with the Zulus 
and the work in progress among them, he seemed to say that, so far from 
their fulfilling the popular conception, that “the heathen in his blindness 
bows down to wood and stone,” there were, as a matter of fact, no idols 
among that nation at all, They have no conception of a Supreme Being ; 
but at the same time they are very superstitious, and in seasons of drought 
they give all their cattle to the rain-makers, all they believe as to a future 
state being that the spirits of their deceased ancestors entered the bodies of 
the numerous snakes in their land, and did so with the malignant intent to 
exercise their influence against mankind. I suppose it is pre-eminently 
true of the Semitic religions that they tend to degenerate. Many of 
them began with a worship of the most beautiful object in creation—the 
