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sition, and if the knowledge of that revelation did not die with him, then we 
find, what we should expect, a more unclouded view of the immortality of 
the soul the further we go back in man’s history, pointing to what we surely 
must reach at Jast (as in the well-known creed of Job, for whom we may 
claim at least some antiquity, we do reach it) namely, what I have ventured 
to call “the full blaze of what is now the brightest hope of the Christian.” 
But I dare not trespass longer on this point, except to add, what perhaps is 
not unimportant in this connexion to the Christian student, that our 
Saviour’s reply to the Sadducees (Matt. xxii. 29-32) must embrace the 
doctrine of the immortality of the soul as underlying the whole of the 
Pentateuch, and of God’s revelation of Himself to Israel. So deeply buried 
a foundation must have been one of those things without which a revelation 
of God to man was impracticable, if not impossible. So that, in this light, 
we can hardly regard it as a matter left to man only to infer if he could. 
On this belief in the immortality of the soul I have based ancestral 
worship. I believe strongly in the value of analogies in the study of man’s 
history : and we have the analogue to pitri, or ancestral, worship in the 
saint-worship of later times. The basis of the later worship is the fact that 
the immortal part of the good is after death in the presence of and com- 
munion with God: the pitris were disembodied spirits living still in the 
presence of Deity, to whom a portion of the sacrificial worship, originally 
due only to the Deity, was already transferred when the earliest of the hymns 
of the Rig-Veda were written. There is a very striking aphorism, and one 
that has impressed many minds, in one of Frederic Robertson’s sermons ; it 
is the expression of the “principle, that no error has spread widely that 
was not an exaggeration, or perversion, of the truth.” What was the truth, 
of which ancestral worship was the perversion? Was it not the approach- 
ableness of God, according to the character of the first revelation of Himself 
to man? Shall we say, it was the divinely-revealed anthropomorphic or 
“‘anthropopsychic” idea? Arguing here according to the analogy of well- 
known facts in the modern history of man, when the “anthropopsychic” 
character of God—the only character under which the Divine could possibly 
be realised by man—was lost, or clouded, perhaps by teachings similar to 
those of Mr. Herbert Spencer, man’s nature still needed the human in his 
worship—the sympathy, the kindness, the love ; and the approach to the 
Divine began to be, as in later times, through the human itself. Thus the 
sacrificial worship, due originally to the Deity, began to be transferred to the 
spirits of the departed. If this be the true account of the origin of ancestral 
worship—and it has at least a most striking analogy in its favour—it could 
only have arisen upon the knowledge, or conviction, of the immortality of the 
soul, and its more immediate communion with the Deity. 
Canon Saumarez Smith is also disposed to -question another statement, 
that ‘‘the primitive man must have had a most elaborate sacrificial worship.” 
Briefly I conclude thus. When we trace back man’s religious history, we 
become more and more conscious that we must be treading amid the débris 
of a once divinely-inspired religion ; nay, we can often, with the certainty 
