168 



W. HOSTE, B.A., ON FETICHISM — 



out most earnestly, " And now, Lord Jesus, I have none but 

 Thee." 



At Thonon, in Savoy, an unconverted woman had a wooden 

 St. Anthony, who is supposed to protect animals ; but many of her 

 pigs fell ill and some died. In her sorrow and indignation the 

 woman upbraided the saint, urging that as she had grown the wood 

 of which it was composed in her garden, and as her son had fashioned 

 the image, that she had not been treated with due consideration after 

 all the trouble she had taken ! 



In Numbers v, 11-31, we have a solemn account of the drinking 

 of the water of bitterness by an accused woman. May not the 

 poison and boiling-water tests in Africa, alluded to by our author 

 on p. 160 of his paper, be a distortion of this God-given Jewish rite ? 

 An instance of degradation, as opposed to a higher upward growth, 

 due to a supposed evolution ? 



The paper is a very valuable one, and the resemblances pointed 

 out between the ancient African fetichism and the spiritism around 

 us, which is called modern, are most striking. 



Mr. Theodore Roberts desired to emphasize Mr. Hoste's 

 conclusion that fetichism was to be regarded as a degradation from 

 a purer faith and as characteristic of the dotage of the race of Ham. 

 He referred to the fact that while black boys easily passed white 

 boys at the age of 12, in later years the white boys surpassed black, 

 and thought that in this there was an analogy with the fact that 

 the race of Ham was the first to be highly civilized, as shown in 

 Assyria (Cush) and Egypt (Mizraim), Gen. x, 6-12, whereas the races 

 both of Shem and Japhet had long since surpassed that of Ham. 



He considered that all available evidence showed that, so far 

 from civilization having been evolved from the savage state, the 

 opposite was the case, the wild men being really the truant children 

 of the human race who had broken away from the restraints of 

 civilization ; there being, as was well known, no instance of a 

 savage tribe becoming civilized apart from contact with civiliza- 

 tion. 



All this pointed to the great fact of the Fall of Man, and showed 

 that the present cult of spiritism was, like fetichism, a concomitant 

 of the dotage of the race that adopted it. He remembered how 

 The Times remarked on Mrs. Annie Besant's adoption of theosophy 



