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the control of countless inferior spirits— manitous or ministering angels. They 
also believed in an immortality and a judgment of all men beyond the grave, 
Hence arose in various forms the doctrine of guardian manitous, represented 
by tokens or teraphim, and watching over individuals, families, . and places. 
Hence arose also the practice of burying with the dead the things he had 
valued in life, as likely, in the vague imaginings of the untaught mind, to 
be useful in the other world. Their traditions also embraced in various and 
crude forms the idea of a mediator or intercessor between God and man. No 
one who studies these beliefs of the American tribes can fail to recognize in 
them the remnants of the same primitive theology which we have in the 
patriarchal age of the Bible, and more or less in the religions of all ancient 
peoples of whom we have historical records. I may say here in passing that 
the tenacity with which the red man of America has clung in his barbarism 
and long isolation, to remnants of primitive truth, is an additional reason why 
we should strive to give him a purer gospel. 
With reference to those prehistoric men, known to us only by their bones 
and implements, it may not be possible to discover their belief as to the 
unity of God ; but we have distinct evidence on the other points. On the 
oldest bone implements— some of them made of the ivory of the now extinct 
mammoth — we find engraved the totems or manitou-marks of their owners, 
and in some cases scratches or punctures, indicating the offerings made or 
successes and deliverances experienced under their auspices. With regard 
to the belief in immortality, perhaps also in a resurrection, the Mentone man 
— whose burial is perhaps the oldest known to us — was interred with his fur 
robes and his hair dressed as in life, with his ornaments of shell wampum on 
his head and limbs, and with a little deposit of oxide of iron, wherewith to 
paint and decorate himself with his appropriate emblems. Nor is he alone 
in this matter. Similar provision for the dead appears at Cro-Magnon and 
the Cave of Bruniquel. Thus the earliest so-called Paleolithic men enter- 
tained beliefs in God and in immortality, perhaps the dim remains of 
primitive theism, perhaps the result of their perception of the invisible things 
of God in the works that He had made. 
The antiquity of man as revealed by his prehistoric remains has probably 
been greatly exaggerated. A careful study of the latest edition of The 
Antiquity of Man, by Sir C. Lyell, in which that great geologist has summed 
up all the scattered evidence on this point, must leave this impression. The 
particular facts adduced are individually doubtful and susceptible of different 
interpretations, though collectively they present an imposing appearance, and 
many of them have been weakened by recent observations and discoveries. 
American analogies teach us, as I propose to show in papers soon to be 
published, that undue importance has been attached to the distinctions of 
Neolithic and Palaeolithic ages. The physical changes which have taken place 
since the advent of man have been measured by standards inapplicable to 
them, and the extinct quadrupeds of the later post-Pliocene period may have 
lived nearer to our time than has been supposed. No human remains have 
been found in beds older than the close of the so-called Glacial period, and 
the earlier indications succeeding this period are not actual bones of men. 
but only rude implements, some of which are possibly naturally-shaped 
stones, and others have had their antiquity exaggerated by misapprehension 
as to the mode of their occurrence. 
It is, however, probable that the investigations now in progress will 
establish the fact that, in the earlier part of man’s residence in the Old 
Continent, he was contemporary with many great quadrupeds now extinct, 
and that some of them, as well as some races of men, may have perished in 
a great continental subsidence which occurred early in the modern or human 
period. Both of these conclusions will, I think, bring themselves finally into 
harmony with the Biblical account of the antediluvian world, notwithstanding 
