20 



ANNUAL ADDRESS. 



frequently, evil, and did it intentionally. But if the act of 

 an enemy in bringing down a club upon his head demonstrated 

 ill-will, what was to be said when a branch of a tree fell 

 upon liis head ? He argued at once that the tree, i.e., the 

 spirit of the tree, was angry with him and meant to do him 

 harm ; and he sought either to punish the tree or to propitiate 

 it, as liis mood inclined him. 



A child to-day, if it receives a painful injury, although 

 through its own fault, from a lifeless object, will almost 

 certainly, if left to itself, set about beating the object which 

 has injured it. But the instinctive action of the modern 

 child is the settled habit of primitive man. Thus a native 

 of Brazil would try to bite the stone over which he stumbled 

 or the arrow by which he was wounded. It is even told how 

 a modern king of Cochin China would put one of his ships, if 

 it sailed badly, in the pillory like a human criminal. 



Times have changed, civilisation has advanced, but the same 

 disposition reappeared in the Athenian judicial procedure 

 when a court of justice sat in the Prytaneum upon an axe or 

 a stone which had caused the death of a human being ; and again 

 down to quite recent days, in the provision of the English law 

 by which not only an animal which killed anybody, but a cart 

 which ran over a person, or a tree which fell upon his head, 

 became ipm fado devoted or elevated to the service of God's- 

 poor. 



Primitive man then personifies Xature. He spiritualizes 

 Nature. He invests natural objects not with life only but with 

 will; and his religion, as expressing the relation which he 

 conceives to exist between his own spirit and the spiritual force 

 outside himself, naturally takes the form of an attempt to- 

 influence the unseen powers in which he instinctively believes. 



This is the beginning of religion. It contains the germ^ of 

 all the infinitely various creeds and cults which have elevated) 

 or desolated liumanity. 



For as man's intellectual faculties were strengthened by 

 ol)servation and reflection, it was almost inevitable that he 

 should effect the speculative transition from so-called idolatry to< 

 polytheism, from th(i worship of many gods to the worship of 



