90 
The Minor Tribes 
supposed, ashamed of their tenets or their prac¬ 
tices, but they are unwilling to speak about them. 
They fear the intentions of the cross-questioner, 
and they hold themselves safest behind a crooked 
answer. Moreover, every Mpongwe is his own 
“ pontifex maximus,” and the want, or rather the 
scarcity, of a regular priesthood must promote 
independence and discrepancy of belief. 
Whilst noticing the Fetishism of the Gaboon I 
cannot help observing, by the way, how rapidly the 
civilization of the nineteenth century is redeveloping, 
together with the “ Religion of Humanity” the old 
faith, not of Paganism, but of Cosmos, of Nature ; 
how directly it is, in fact, going back to its older gods. 
The Unknowable of our day is the Brahm, the Aka- 
rana-Zaman, the Gaboon Anyambia, of which no¬ 
thing can be predicated but an existence utterly un¬ 
intelligible to the brain of man, a something free 
from the accidents of personality, of volition, of 
intelligence, of design, of providence ; a something 
which cannot be addressed by veneration or wor¬ 
ship; whose sole effects are subjective, that is, upon 
the worshipper, not upon the worshipped. Nothing 
also can be more illogical than the awe and respect 
claimed by Mr. Herbert Spencer for a being of 
which the very essence is that nothing can be 
known of it. And, as the idea grows, the several 
modes and forms of the Unknowable, the Hor- 
muzd and Ahriman of the Dualist, those personi- 
