PROGRESS AND POSITION OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL SCIENCES. 633 



Perseus.'' More recently, Mr. Andrew Lang has sought to show that 

 the idea of a Supreme Being occurs at au earlier stage in the develop- 

 ment of savage thought than we had hitherto supposed. Striking as 

 these various collocations of facts and the conclusions drawn from them 

 may appear, I am convinced there is much more for the folklorist to do 

 in the same directions. 



The principle that underlies it all seems to be this: Man can destroy 

 nothing, man can create nothing, man can not of his own mere volition 

 even permanently modify anything. A higher power restrains his 

 operations, and often reverses his work. You think you have exter- 

 minated a race; you have put to the sword every male you can find, 

 and you have starved and poisoned all the survivors of the community. 

 In the meanwhile, their blood has been mingled with yours, and for 

 generations to come your bones and those of your descendants will pre- 

 serve a record of that lost race. You think you have exterminated a 

 religion; you have burned to death all of its teachers you can find, and 

 converted forcibly or by persuasion the rest of the community. But 

 you can not control men's thoughts, and the old beliefs and habits will 

 spring up again and again, and insensibly modify your own religion, 

 pure as you may suppose it to be. 



Huxley, in his address to the department of anthropology twenty 

 years ago, said, with the force and candor that were characteristic of 

 him: "Anthropology has nothing to do with the truth or falsehood of 

 religion — it holds itself absolutely and entirely aloof from such ques- 

 tions — but the natural history of religion and the origin and the growth 

 of the religions entertained by the different kinds of the human race 

 are within its proper and legitimate province." I do not presume to 

 question that as an absolutely accurate definition of the position — it 

 could not be otherwise; but if there be any here to whom what I have 

 been suggesting is in any sense novel or startling, I should be glad to 

 be allowed to say one word of reassurance to them. When my friend 

 Mr. Olodd shocked some of the members of the Folklore Society by his 

 frank statement of conclusions at which he had arrived, following the 

 paths I have indicated, it was said we must fall back on the evidences 

 of Christianity. What more cogent evidence of Christianity can you 

 have than its existence? It stands to-day as the religion which, in 

 most civilized countries, represents that which has been found by the 

 operation of natural laws to be best suited for the present circum- 

 stances of mankind. You are a Christian because you can not help it. 

 Turn Mahometan to-morrow, will you stop the spread of Christianity? 

 Your individual renunciation of Christianity will be but a ripple on 

 a wave. Civilized mankind holds to Christianity, and can not but do 

 so till it can find something better. This, it seems to me, is a stronger 

 evidence of Christianity than any of the loose-jointed arguments I find 

 in evidential literature. 



Upon this thorny subject I will say no more. I would not have said 

 so much, but that I wish to show that these considerations are not 



