632 PROGRESS AND POSITION OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL SCIENCES. 



have been excogitated by some of the least advanced among peoples, 

 and if we observe how large a share that idea has in forming the dog- 

 mas of the more specialized religions of the present day, we shall not 

 see anything inherently unreasonable in the generalization that the 

 group of theories and practices which constitute the great province of 

 man's emotions and mental operations expressed in the term "religion" 

 has passed through the same stages and produced itself in the same 

 way from these early rude beginnings of the religious sentiment as 

 every other mental exertion. We shall see in religion as real a part of 

 man's organization as any physical member or mental faculty. We 

 shall have no reason to think that it is an exception to any general law 

 of progress and of continuity which is found to prevail in any other 

 part of man's nature. 



The same inference may be drawn from many other considerations. 

 Take, for instance, the belief in witchcraft, which is so characteristic of 

 uncivilized man that it is hardly necessary to cite examples of it. The 

 Eev. Mr. Coillard, a distinguished missionary of the Evangelical Society 

 of Paris, in a delightful record, which has just been published, of his 

 twenty years' labors as a missionary pioneer among the Banyai, and 

 Barotzi of the Upper Zambesi, "on the threshold of Central Africa," 

 says : " In the prison of the Barotzi, toiling at earthworks, is a woman — 

 young, bright, and intelligent. She told me her story. A man of re- 

 markably gentle character had married her. The king's sister, Katoka, 

 having got rid of one of her husbands, cast her eyes on this man and 

 took him. He had to forsake his young wife — quite an easy matter. 

 Unfortunately, a little later on, a dead mouse was found in the princess' 

 house. There was a great commotion, and the cry of witchcraft was 

 raised. The bones did not fail to designate the young woman, and she 

 was made a convict. A few years ago she would have been burned 

 alive. Ah, my friends, paganism is an odius and a cruel thing." Ah, 

 Mr. Coillard, is it many years ago that she would have been burnt alive 

 or drowned in Christian England or Christian America 1 ? Surely the 

 odiousness and the cruelty are not special to paganism any more than 

 to Christianity. The one and the other are due to ignorance and super- 

 stition, and these are more hateful in a Matthew Hale or a Patrick 

 Henry than in a Barotzi princess in the proportion that they ought to 

 have been more enlightened and intelligent than she. It is only one 

 hundred and twenty-two years since John Wesley wrote : "I can not 

 give up to all the Deists in Great Britain the existence of witchcraft;" 

 and I believe that to this day the Order of Exorcists is a recognized 

 order in the Catholic Church. 



The same line of argument — which, of course, I am only indicating 

 here — might be pursued, I am persuaded, in numberless other directions. 

 Mr. Frazer, in his work on the Golden Bough, has most learnedly 

 applied it to a remarkable group of beliefs and observances. Mr. Hart- 

 land has followed up that research with a singularly luminous study 

 of several other groups of ideas in the three volumes of his "Legend of 



