220 
—— 
But, if by “ primitive man” we are to understand “ pre- 
historic ” man, such a man as we could acknowledge to be a 
man, how are we to know that his intelligence, however he 
came by it, was such as necessarily to be devoid of both 
religious ideas and sentiments? It is very much in vogue to 
name the Fijian, the Karen, the Zulu, “‘ primitive” men, a 
term that can~ only be correct on the assumption that they 
are true representatives, in their knowledge and habits, of 
the pre-historic man. But is this assumption correct? It 
certainly cannot be proved. ‘There is nothing to prove that 
their remote ancestors were not more civilised than they. 
History teems with instances of decline in many phases of 
what is broadly called civilisation. Was there not, for instance, 
a decline, and that unto the death, in what may be called art- 
civilisation in England, between the times of the building of 
our ancient cathedrals and the building of the Peel churches? 
Was there a man in England at the beginning of the nine- 
teenth century, who retained more than a tradition—and that, 
-perhaps, a tradition that he did not care for—of the art- 
civilisation of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries? A 
thousand points of civilisation have, in like manner, been lost 
in the histories of nations. And this is equally true of 
religion ; as witness the condition of the Coptic Church in 
Kgypt, the Church of St. Thomas in South India, or others 
nearer home. We cannot, therefore, safely measure the state 
of pre-historic man by the present state of so-called uncivi- 
lised tribes. It may be that they have declined in religious 
sentiment and perception; and that many of the tendencies 
which Mr. Herbert Spencer has taken note of have been the 
causes which have rather degraded and polluted a once pure 
fountain of religious idea and practice, than marked the steps 
of their development. 
History testifies in numberless instances to such change 
from the nobler to the more ignoble: thus reversing the 
materialist view of religion. Thus, to take an example already 
touched upon, Zeus, quoted by Mr. Spencer as contributing 
to his view of the matter, did not begin his history as a man 
in a chariot, with a thunderbolt instead of an assegai in his 
hand, but he was the Dyu, or Dyaus, of an earlier stage of 
human worship, the ‘‘ bright heaven,” or “light,” that being 
a primitive name for the supreme God; a name which still, 
under the form dev, or div, expresses the idea of deity to all 
India, and remains with ourselves in our word divine. The 
anthropomorphism, therefore, of the Homeric Zeus was not 
a prinntive conception, but a degradation of the primitive. 
