240 
cally, to be traced back to some one architect who planned 
the original one. How is it, then, that the Temple of 
Sepharvaim, discovered by Mr. Rassam, the Tabernacle in 
the Wilderness, Solomon’s Temple, the Hindu temples, the 
old Greek temples, are all constructed on one particular 
plan? Here, again, we are taken back to a single ideal in 
the remote past in connexion with the externals of religion. 
And the inference is, at the least, that religion began in times 
as remote as we can possibly at present reach, with as perfect 
a ritual as any we can find in existing documents. Andif we 
believe that one of those temples was constructed on plans 
laid down by Jehovah Himself for His own worship, with a 
ritual of His own appointing, we can scarcely hesitate to 
believe that the first one of all was from the same hand. 
Other illustrations of a similar kind are possible ; but these 
are, perhaps, sufficient to support my thesis. 
We do not, then, seem to find the “ primitive human mind” 
—if by that we mean the mind of the pre-historic man— 
altogether ‘‘ without religious ideas or religious sentiments,” 
though we can see him pretty clearly as he existed as a 
religious man at least 4,000 yearsago. Nor do we find that, ‘i 
the course of social evolution and the evolution of fitellioene: 
accompanying it, there are generated both the ideas and 
sentiments which we distinguish as religious.” On the 
contrary, we find that the man of 4,000 years ago had received 
from his ancestors conceptions of the Deity equal to those 
which we now possess. What we really do see, in tracing 
‘the course of social evolution” (if I may still use the word, 
though with a slightly different meaning) ‘‘and the evolution 
of intelligence accompanying it,” is that human nature has 
had a constant tendency to, and has constantly fallen in the 
direction of, what we may best term as materialism. Instead 
of, as Professor Max Miller says, discerning a “ gradual 
advance from the material to the spiritual, from the sensuous 
to the super-sensuous, from the human to the super-human and 
the divine,’* we discern, as I firmly hold, on a candid 
examination of history, a constant tendency to retreat from 
the spiritual to the material, from the super-sensuous to the 
sensuous, from the super-human and the divine to the 
hnman. 
If it be retorted that 4,000 years is nothing in man’s 
history, and that ages previous to that he was working his 
way in Mr. Spencer’s style, and that he may have reached by 
* India, p. 159. 
