THE THEOLOGICAL REVIEW: A JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT AND LIFE. "Our fathers worshiped in this mountain; and ye say, that in Jerusalem is "The hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jeru- the true worshipers shall worship the But the hour cometh, and now is, when Father in spirit and in truth: for the Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth." (John iv. 20, 21, 23, 24.) VOL. XII. Nos. XLVIII.-LI. LONDON: WILLIAMS & NORGATE, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, MANCHESTER: JOHNSON & RAWSON, 89, MARKET STREET. 1875. gt. wenly lib 6-17-39 THE THEOLOGICAL REVIEW. No. XLVIII-JANUARY, 1875. I. THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THEISM. A GLANCE at the world acquaints us with the prevalence of worship, consequently of some conception of Deity, in human society. We cannot indeed say what used to be said, what Plutarch and Cicero so confidently affirmed, that belief in God is found wherever man is found. A better-informed ethnology contradicts that assertion. There are certainly peoples in whose life, if travellers report them truly, this element is altogether wanting. The natives of the valley of La Plata and of Paraguay, according to Azara, were entirely destitute of any religious beliefs or rites when he travelled among them. The missionaries who visited those tribes, supposing that they must have some sort of religion, took for idols the figures carved upon their pipes and bowls, and burned those implements accordingly. Others, seeing them beat the air on the appearance of the new moon, imagined that they worshiped that luminary. "But the positive fact is," says Azara, "that they worship nothing in the world, and have absolutely no religion."* According to Crantz, the Greenlanders had no religious ceremonies, and exhibited no sign of religious life. Schoolcraft describes the Camanches as equally godless. Sir John Lubbock has accumulated a mass of testimony to the same effect from travellers in regions inhabited by * See "Voyages," II. pp. 3 and 137. Quoted by Schelling, Philosophie d. Mythologie, p. 73. |