78 REV. M. EELLS, ON THE WORSHIP AND TRADITIONS OP 



Moses himself, I reply they are Mohammedans, and they owe what 

 they know of Allah to tlie Old Testament scriptures. But I 

 contend that there is no evidence in ancient or modern times that 

 any people have believed (unless they have had access to our 

 scriptures) in the one God — in such a God as is revealed to us in 

 the sci'iptures of the Old and JSTew Testaments. You may find this 

 evidence on the Assyrian tablets. You remember on the Creation 

 tablets the gods are distinctly spoken of there as not being in 

 existence when the Heavens and the Earth were first in existence. 

 It would take too long for me to bring forward further evidence 

 of this now ; but it is a matter which is not properly thought 

 over in England. It is simply a fact that the heathen and those 

 who have never had the revelation which we enjoy, are aco i ev 



TIV KOVfXW. 



I was so glad to hear that remark made by the Chairman, I 

 think, that it was such a false notion that the human I'ace had 

 begun in a state of degradation, and that we had been working 

 up, better and better, from that time to the present. What the 

 Word of God states is that God put man upon the earth and 

 made him perfect, and that it has been a gradual downward path 

 that they have travelled upon, who have never had the revelation 

 from God to keep them in the right way, and the practical con- 

 clusion for us is this — that so long as we have, as I trust I have, 

 absolute and undoubted faith in the Old and New Testament 

 scriptures and in them only, as from God alone, the moment we 

 get away from that, we ourselves begin, in proportion to the 

 distance which we remove from it, to become more and more 

 degraded in our own minds. 



Captain Heath. — Perhaps I may say a few words on this 

 matter. I think the discrepancy between Sir John Lubbock's 

 statements and those of the missionaries as to the religious beliefs 

 of the Australian nations may be accounted for by the fact that 

 the tribes that ai'e almost innumerable cover a very small area, 

 and their ideas are different on many points. The natives — and I 

 have been in most parts of the continent — who have seen very 

 little of the white people, I should say had no idea of what we 

 understand as deity at all. They had a great dread of the dark. 

 They had an idea of spirit life, and imagined that all white people, 

 when they came among them first, were the spirits of the dead 

 who jumped up white men. Their religion consists in a dread of 



