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type of being much lower in the scale of humanity than themselves. This 
being so, surely Mr. Collins’s method is a sound one, namely, that we should 
look back to the earliest historic books and records, and see what testimony 
they are able to afford. For my part, I think that the more one looks at 
those old records the more profoundly is one struck by the degeneracy of 
modern heathenism. (Hear, hear.) When I use the word “modern,” I 
mean modern in a comparative sense ; because, after all, modern heathenism 
began when Abraham uttered his protest against it; and yet, even in 
Abraham’s days, what, we may ask, was the state of Egypt? Is there a 
single idolatrous image in the interior of the great Pyramid? The best 
judges say “no.” There is the winged circle, which is supposed to be 
the emblem of the Deity, and that, I think, is the only thing of the kind 
there to be found. If we may accept the ancient recbrds contained in the 
Bible as history,—and the man must be a bold sceptic who would deny their 
historical value,—it is interesting to find how the patriarchs appealed to the 
knowledge of the one Divine Being with perfect confidence, and the appeal 
was not refused. The God of Abraham was recognised as the one God, and 
in a way that is surprising if we say that the worship of the Egyptians in 
those days was the worship of the Egyptians in a later and more debased 
state. I believe it will be found that this was universally the case, whether 
in Egypt, in Assyria, or among any of the Aryan tribes, or even those 
of the Vedas and the Zendavesta—wherever we look among the most 
ancient records we find there was but one conception of the one God— 
God the Infinite—evidenced in the beginning of the history of their re- 
ligion. We owe a good deal to the Greeks; but we must remember 
that their conception of heathendom was the most perfectly sensuous 
of all the forms that heathendom has assumed. We know that Greek 
heathendom was the finest type of that condition of belief—at once the most 
artistic and the most sensuous, but by no means the highest. They had fallen 
very far below the nobler worship of their ancestors ; they had fallen very 
far below the savage Goths, who, in the strength of their old faith, came 
down upon and harried the civilised world, whose religion had become a 
snare and not a source of strength to them. We hear a good deal about 
what is termed the mere fetish-worshipper, who has no conception of a God. 
But does such a creature exist ? Bishop Crowther does not know him ; none 
of the missionaries have met with him. No doubt, he exists in the minds of 
those who refer to him, because he is required ; but, at any rate, he is very 
difficult to find. But let us see what this fetish conception is. It is not an 
original nor a primary conception in the fetish-worshipper’s mind. It is 
merely a vain attempt on the part of an utterly gross intellect to grasp a 
conception which it knows exists but which is quite beyond its reach. The 
fetish-worshipper no more believes that the fetish is an actual God than 
the Greek, who never got beyond the use of the abacus, conceived that the 
balls on the string by which he was counting were the actual sum he was 
working. It was simply, in the case of both, a material representation of a __ 
