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the fact that some of these higher and lower stages of religious 
belief often actually co-exist in the same age, and among the 
same people, we have to trace, as far as possible, which of them 
has had historical priority. Sir John Lubbock — assuming what 
he desires to prove, rather than proving it — slips into the fol- 
lowing easy observation : — 
Where man, either by natural progress or by the influence of a more ad- 
vanced race, rises to the conception of a higher religion, he still retains his 
old beliefs, which linger on side by side with, and yet in utter opposition to, 
the higher creed. The new and more powerful spirit is an addition to the 
old Pantheon, and diminishes the importance of the older deities ; gradually 
the worship of the latter sinks in the social scale, and becomes confined to 
the ignorant and the young. 
4. Remarks like these glide easily from the pen of a ready 
writer; but you will observe that they consist entirely of 
assertion. The fact of a contemporaneous mingling together 
of higher and lower beliefs in certain countries justifies us 
in making no a priori conclusion as to which came first in 
point of order. According to the dogmatic statement of Sir 
John Lubbock, a transfer from inferior to superior faith 
has been universal. But is this opinion historical? Do the 
evidences furnished by ethnological research confirm this view ? 
Taking the higher or lower estimates of belief in a Deity as 
the crucial test of this great question, what do facts proclaim 
concerning it ? 
5. Such are the inquiries which I propose to prosecute in the 
present paper. 
6. One instance of a contemporary co-existence of higher and 
lower religious belief is to be seen in Madagascar, where the 
natives, though they were found in the 17th century worshipping 
their departed ancestors, and reverencing charms and idols, yet 
possessed the knowledge of a Supreme and Supernatural Deity, 
whose attributes directly connected religion with morality. 
Robert Drury, who was shipwrecked upon Madagascar in 1702, 
and remained there as a slave till 1717, and whose narrative is 
universally received as trustworthy, tells us that the name by 
which this Supreme Being is known signifies “the Lord above, 
between w r hom and mankind there are four mediators. Now 
this, according to Sir John Lubbock's theory, marks a high and 
later development of religious belief, which could only have been 
reached after a passage through the lower stages of savagery. 
We have a right, therefore, to expect some historical proof of 
this order of sequence ; or evidence, at least, of some sort, 
beyond the bare assertion of such a statement. So far from this. 
