THE ABORIGINES OF THE ISLANDS OP THE PACIFIC OCEAN. 77 



may boldly say that it is most unsafe to state tliat any tribe, 

 however clegTaded, has no knowledge of a divine Being. It is a 

 fact that there are a good many survivors of fetish worship. 

 Much has been v/ritten on that subject, and missionaries and those 

 who have had to do with people who worship fetiches state that 

 the whole conception of fetich worship, as generally understood, 

 may exist elsewhere, but does not exist as particular fetich 

 worship. The idea of worship of the fetich, without deity 

 behind, is utterly unknown to those who worship the fetich, and I 

 say it is only those who have carefully studied the people and 

 sympathised with them, who get at their ideas. Of course too 

 much communication with civilization may spoil tradition. I 

 believe there is nothing more destructive to tradition than the 

 Education Act, for instance, and in the same way the Christian 

 native is partly ashamed of his traditions and partly inclined to 

 make them out, either better or worse than they were, and it is 

 very valuable to have on record the earliest possible information 

 that can be obtained from those people. 



I hope others will give us the benefit of their views. 



Rev. T. J. Gaster- — Perhaps I may be allowed to make a few 

 remarks on the Pa,per. 



I think that probably it is well worth thinking how vast a 

 portion of the human race, at the present time, is avowedly 

 atheistic. The whole of the Buddhists ai^e atheists. Atheism is 

 at the very bottom of Buddhism, and Buddhists are believed by 

 some to outnumber all the Christians at the present time. 



In writing to the Ephesians, who you remember were not 

 behind the rest of the world in the number of the deities and 

 gods and goddesses they worshipped, St. Paul in his Epistle to 

 them, before they became Christians, says in Chapter II, verse 12,. 

 ..." having no hope and without Grod in the world " {aOeoi eu 

 TLc Kovjiiic), or literally, "Atheists in the world." Having been in 

 India and having talked with many Indians in the North-west 

 Provinces in Bengal and in the Punjaub, I always found on 

 questioning them closely upon their ideas that the personage they 

 chose to call God was not in their mind a person in the least 

 corresponding with the God in the Bible. In every case it is a 

 local deity. 



If it be said that you find millions of people in India who speak 

 of the one God with almost as much reverence and fulness as- 



