IMAGES AND KAMES. Ill 



It does not appear that idols accompany religious ideas down 

 to the lowest levels of the human race^ but rather that they be- 

 long to a period of transition and growth. At least this seems 

 the only reasonable explanation of the fact^ that in America, 

 for instance, among the lowest races, the Fuegians and the 

 Indians of the southern forests, we hear little or nothing of 

 idols. Among the so-called Eed Indians of the North, we 

 sometimes find idols worshipped and sacrificed to, but not com- 

 monly, while in Mexico and Peru the whole apparatus of idols, 

 temples, priests, and sacrifices is found in a most complex and 

 elaboi'ate form. It does not seem, indeed, that the growth of 

 the use of images may be taken as any direct measure of the 

 growth of religious ideas, which is complicated with a multi- 

 tude of other things. But it seems that when man has got 

 some way in developing the religious element in him, he begins 

 to catch at the device of setting a puppet or a stone as the 

 symbol and representative of the notions of a higher being 

 which are floating in his mind. He sees in it, as a child does 

 in a doll, a material form which his imagination can clothe with 

 all the attributes of a being which he has never seen, but of 

 whose existence and nature he judges by what he supposes to 

 be its works. He can lodge it in the place of honour, cover it 

 up in the most precious garments, propitiate it with offerings 

 such as would be acceptable to himself. The Christian mis- 

 sionary goes among the heathen to teach the doctrines of a 

 higher rehgion, and to substitute for the crude superstition of 

 the savage a belief in a God so far beyond human comprehen- 

 sion, that no definition of the Deity is possible to man beyond 

 vague predications, as of infinite power, duration, knowledge, 

 and goodness. It is not perhaps to be wondered at, that the 

 missionary should see nothing in idol-worship but hideous folly 

 and wickedness, and should look upon an idol as a special in- 

 vention of the devil. He is strengthened, moreover, in such a 

 view by the fact that by the operation of a certain law of the 

 human mind (of which more will be said presently), the idol, 

 which once served a definite and important purpose in the edu- 

 cation of the human race, has come to be confounded with the 

 idea of which it was the symbol, and has thus become the parent 



