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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.” 
I think that that is a most questionable statement. It seems to me that 
if we look back to what history tells us, we shall find that the older worship 
diminished in popularity, and in the belief of the great mass of the people ; 
it became confined rather to the initiated and the learned, and that was 
a step which was certainly retrogressive, and not advancing. In one passage, 
reference is made to Unkulunkulu, described by Sir John Lubbock as the 
Zulu Mam. But it should be borne in mind that one of the earliest forms o 
worship that we can trace is that of deified man. There, at? any rate, you have 
but one being worshipped under the form of man, it is true, for the savages 
knew no other being but man, and therefore they made him into a god ; so that, 
even going back so far as that, we still have the monotheistic idea. Then, it 
we take the religions of Babylon and Assyria, Sir Henry Rawlmson tells us 
that the purest form of their worship is dualism. No doubt there were two 
principles, — that of good and that of evil ; but the evil principle very rare y 
appears. He is only alluded to once in the ancient inscriptions which ^' 8 
been found, whereas the principle of good is constantly alluded to. u e 
the principle of good, Ormuzd, is very generally found, Ahnman, the prin- 
ciple of evil, occurs only once ; and that shows that the form of worship was 
certainly not polytheistic. My main objection, however, to Mr. Titcom./s 
paper is that it does not go far enough back, and I have no doubt that worn i 
be Sir John Lubbock’s answer to it ; that he is referring all the tune to a lar 
more remote period than any dealt with in this paper. 
Mr. Row— I have not read Sir John Lubbock’s book very lately. I own 
that the term “ pre-historic ” is somewhat misapplied, seeing that a great deal 
of its illustrations are derived from- historic times. The general principle 
Sir John Lubbock’s work seems to be this : to go over the whole of the exist- 
ing savage races and to infer, from the theology of the savage races which now 
exist, what was the theology of the earliest races which do not now exist. 
If the inquiry be simply as to what opinions were held by prehistoric man, 
the inquiry, in one sense, would be absurd, because if we have no nstoiy v e 
cannot tell what the people believed,— that is inevitable. (Laughter.) But 
wonder at the logic of Sir John Lubbock. No doubt it is possible to travel 
over all the existing savage races of mankind, and reduce their various 
religious beliefs into such a system as Sir John Lubbock has propounded, 
which has seven branches. No doubt you can systematize the absurd beliefs 
of savage races in this way if you like, but it by no means follows that you 
are therefore entitled to invert the cone, so to speak, and to say that atheism 
was the earliest form of belief in the mind of the first original savage, and 
that religious belief went on developing itself upwards m a continually im- 
proving form, until we come at last to pure monotheism. This seems to me 
to be vicious reasoning, and I do not understand on what principle a man is 
entitled to take the existing beliefs of savage races, to range them m his own 
