has been remarked upon consciousness goes far to silence the objection. But, if valid, it applies to every kind of experience, for all experience involves feeling. Then, too, the feelings, when they assert themselves, become facts, and it is as legitimate to build an argument upon them as to matters upon which they have a bearing, as upon any class of facts. The emotional is as real a part of us as the intellectual, the moral, or the physical, and is as generally reliable. That we may err in deductions from it is not denied; but so may we in deductions from mental manifestations, or physical. The whole history of science shows false interpretations of nature. But do we therefore disbelieve nature and all science? Has too implicit reliance on the senses never led to trouble? "The liability to deception," as has been said, "only proves that man is not infallible, not that his faculties are not to be trusted." It may be added, that in Christian experience there is special divine provision for its verification in the cooperative and corroborative witness of the Holy Spirit with that of the human spirit or consciousness. "The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God."

The argument from experience can never wear out or become obsolete. It has always been made the most of when the Church was aiming to measure up to the highest New Testament ideals; its depreciation and decline have always been attended by the decay of spiritual vitality and aggressive movements on the world. It has been conspicuous among the causal forces of all the genuine and abiding great religious awakenings of our era, and in the unrivaled Wesleyan revival of the closing years of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth it was a chief contributing agency. Manifest tendencies of our times to a freezing formalism, to a dead faith that is hardly better than unbelief, to a stereotyped, emotionless legalism, or to mere æsthetic proprieties and ritualistic routine in the name of religion as enough to make us good Christians and acceptable church members, emphasize the importance of having attention

anew called to it. It is a remark of John Stuart Blackie that the early Church "worked by a fervid moral contagion, not by the suasion of cool argument," and that "the Christian method of conversion, not by logical arguments, but by moral contagion and the effusion of the Holy Ghost, has, with the masses of mankind, always proved itself the most effective." But this moral contagion, with its specified accompaniment, has no explanation, indeed is inconceivable, apart from the experience the early Christians had of the transforming efficacy of the Gospel in their hearts and lives, accepted by them as the indisputable proof of its divinity. It must always be so. If, for enlarged effectiveness, the Church is called in any measure to return to first principles, can it do better than begin here? Has it not been a loser, we will not say by surrendering, but by loosening its hold upon, this approved instrumentality of a converting ministry and conquering Church? May we not learn from our fathers? It was the element of personal experience they wove into their preaching and testimonies, which was "as a burning fire shut up in their bones," so that "they were weary with forbearing, and they could not stay," that more than anything else, except the help of the inspiring, energizing Spirit, made them the men of power they were. And the incontrovertible teaching of the centuries is, that when saved men and women, like Paul in Corinth, are so "pressed in spirit" that they "cannot but speak the things they have seen and heard," people will hear and something will happen.

W. S. Edwarda.

ART. IX. THE PRIMITIVE RELIGION OF MANKIND.

ONE of the burning questions in the science of religion is, "What was the primitive religion of man?" This is as it should be. The nature of any mental phenomenon can be fully known only when its origin has been traced and inmost springs laid bare. But to reach the beginnings in any science is difficult, if not impossible. The human race has no more recollection of its own origin than a child has of its own birth. The historical traditions of humanity do not reach back anywhere near to the primitive ages. History knows of founders of religions, but these have always been connected by a thousand bonds to religions that previously existed. The religious documents of even the ancient Chaldeans, Egyptians, Chinese, Vedic Indians-documents which are older than any individual founders of religions of whom we know anything-all show us religion as something already existing in full bloom

and not as

just emerging. Thus, in any attempt to reach the truth on this subject we must try to combine philosophical with historical inquiry. That theory will come nearest to the solution of the problem of the primitive religion of man which both possesses the highest degree of psychological probability and at the same time best explains the assured facts of re

ligious history.

One of the favorite hypotheses of our time is that of the Darwinian evolutionist. Not able to appeal to well-authenticated historical facts, and prompted by the apparent exigencies of his theory, he has looked about him to discover, if possible, in the present, some hints that can tell him of the primitive past. Fixing his eyes upon savage hordes that still exist, he says, "Ah! here is what I want!" Then, since the religion of a people may naturally be expected to correspond to the general level of its culture, the first religion, he assured 118, was fetichism, deification of corpses, belief in ghosts, or in spirits of fountains, rivers, trees, winds, waves, sticks, stones, rubbish, also of animals, now of the earthly fire of the

hearth, then of the heavenly fire, then of the storm, and, finally, the sun, moon, stars, and the overarching heaven embracing all. Thence the progress was easy to polytheism, and finally to ethical monotheism. David Hume anticipated this modern notion of the primitive savagery of man. In his Natural History of Religion, with a strange mixture of logic and sophistry, he tries to prove that men as barbarous animals necessarily began with polytheism. It has been defended by such writers as Lubbock, Tylor, Peschel, Tiele, Letourneau, Darwin, Spencer, Caspari, etc. One of the most recent works of this school was published in 1897 by Grant Allen on The Evolution of the Idea of God. a startling kind of book had not the world been treated to so many similar specimens. It traces religion back to ghost worship, or, rather, to the actual worship of the very corpse itself and acts of deference to the bodies of the dead.

This would be

Now these theories would certainly be sufficiently startling if true. Did the greatest moral power in history, all that is most thrilling in human affairs, spring, then, from so humble a root? "The sublime devotion of the martyr, the cheerful endurance of affliction, the pouring out treasures of charity at the feet of suffering man, the sacred yearning of the soul for the infinite, the deep thoughts of such men as Paul, Augustine, Pascal, the rapture of the soul upborne above all transient things, aspiration after the ideal, heart sorrow for sin, tears that will not be dried, the craving for pardon and righteousness-all this and more the result of the wild dream of a savage bewildered with the hunting feast, a ghost story, or acts of deference to a corpse!" Certainly the disproportion between the fact and its explanation is wonderful enough. But the theory is not therefore false. The disproportion is no greater than between the primal germ of a Shakespeare or a Paul and the fully developed man. The humble nature of the root is nothing against the glory of the tree. There is no reason for panic in the Christian camp. Religion has been what it has been and is what it is, whatever its original germ. The sole question is, "Is the explanation true?”

This entire mode of treatment rests upon two assumptions which never have been proved and which no serious attempt is made to prove. They are simply taken for granted. But until they are proved they ought certainly to play a humbler part in the discussion, for though hypotheses are permissible as furnishing possible explanations of known facts they ought not to be assumed as themselves facts and then made regulative of the whole treatment, as though they had been clearly demonstrated. These two assumptions are that man began his career in a savage, almost brutal, condition, and that the savages of to-day are survivals, and more or less perfect types, of primitive man.

Both are due to the supposed exigencies of the Darwinian hypothesis. The consistent transformist seems to think himself compelled, in the interest of his theory of evolution, to place the primitive man as near to the level of the brute as he can, so as to make him almost entirely nontheistic, if not utterly nonreligious. Many of the school do make man begin not with intelligent ignorance but in brutish, sensuous stupidity. Here again there is no reason for hysteria on the part of Christians. The vital question is less the beginnings and the process than the product and the prospect. What though man were cradled with the ape if he may reign with the angels? What if he began with hate, lust, and the dominance of brute instincts if he can rise into Christlike beauty of character and enjoy filial fellowship with God? We can well afford to possess our souls in peace and patience while we calmly ask, "Are these theories supported by facts and reasons?" We believe they are supported by neither.

Not to speak of many scientific objections which have not yet been satisfactorily answered as to the transformist hypothesis in general, but which do not directly concern us here, there is a question too often ignored by this school. Shall we as theists or as atheists view this process? Huxley may be right in saying that the doctrine of evolution is in itself neither theistic nor atheistic; that it has no more to do with theism than Euclid has. But the man who thinks upon the