systems, which are now regarded as representing the highest good.

But the passage from the Earth to Heaven, which the human mind has made, has been like an aërial ascent, in which, at every stage, it has been necessary to cast out the earthy ballast which dragged man down. As faith soared into purer light, these weights were cast adrift, and, being left behind, appeared like earthly things; although the time was when they were seen as bright lights, shining in the heavens. Man's gaze is upwards, and when he glances down below, from the point he has attained he sees the things he cast away-his stepping-stones to light-as plunged in sombre gloom, and, forgetful of their history, despises them.

The first outcome of animism was fetishism, arising from the belief that a material body was necessary for every soul or spirit, and that, when a soul or spirit found itself disembodied, it was rest. less, intractable, and incapable of communication with material man; and, at most, could only appear to him in dreams and trances. Something of this idea is discernible in the Odyssey, where the unsubstantial shades of the departed are described as incapable of rational action, until feasted on the lifeblood of the recently slain victims :

All pale ascends my royal mother's shade:
A queen of Troy she saw her legions pass;
Now a thin form is all Anticlea was!
Struck at the sight I melt with filial woe,
And down my cheek the pious sorrows flow,
Yet as I shook my falchion o'er the blood,
Regardless of her son the parent stood.

But say why yonder on the lonely strands,
Unmindful of her son, Anticlea stands?

Know; to the spectres, that thy bev'rage taste,
The scenes of life recur, and actions past;
They, seal'd with truth, return the sure reply;
The rest, repell'd, a train oblivious fly.

When near Anticlea moved and drank the blood
Straight all the mother in her soul awakes.1

According to Arabian legends, the Jinns were spirits created without bodies, and are supposed to be perpetually wandering about to find bodies to inhabit; and Asmodeus, the demon of lust, seeks to enter human bodies, in order to give himself up to carnal enjoyments.

The savage mind, believing in the existence of myriads of souls or spirits, saw no objection to several spirits inhabiting the same body or substance, and passing freely from one to another. It became, therefore, a matter of great importance to cause, if

1 "Odyssey," b. 11.

possible, the right spirit to be in the right substance, so as to either utilize its power for good, or to neutralize its malignant powers. If a man was ill of a fever, he was deemed to be possessed by a fever demon; the desideratum then was to get some propitious and stronger demon to enter the man's body and expel the fever demon. From this belief the doctrines of demoniacal possession, spiritual inspiration, exorcism by incantations, and the laying of spirits, had their rise. It was firmly believed that if the proper forms were used, a spirit could be isolated in a substance, like electricity in a Leyden jar, and that the operator could then, at will, wield the spirit's power, and discharge it in any desired direction.

This principle being firmly established, then everything having a material existence was capable of being a fetish, and subserving the will of any one having power over the possessed matter: animals, trees, stocks and stones were recognized as fetishes at an early stage; particularly famous trees, strange or intelligent animals, stones that had fallen from heaven, like the aërolite, in which Artemis of the Ephesians was believed to reside: even now the African negroes and other tribes worship the stone hammers and arrow-heads, relics of the stone age, the origin of which is forgotten, under the impression that they dropped from heaven, and must therefore contain some powerful spirit..

But man in time required something more realistic than an upright block of wood, or a boulder, as the embodiment of his constant allies, the spirits; and he began to shape his fetish in accordance with his notion of the spirits' forms and attributes; the spirits were in general those of his ancestors, and traditions of men of low stature, with coarse strong limbs and open mouths thirsting for blood, rejoicing in slaughter and the effusion of blood, and promoting that end to the utmost of their power, was naturally the conception formed of those early ancestors. We therefore find the dumpy semi-bestial, open-mouthed figure of Bes, with a slaughtering knife in each hand as an image of a demon deity, furnished, too, with a tail, whether from supposition, or from a tradition that the remote ancestor rejoiced in that ornament, it is now impossible to say. If the king of Dahomey should come to be represented in his true character by some pious descendant, he would be not inaptly modelled like Bes, minus the tail. Destruction is a frantic joy accompanying a low and brutal nature : the blood-thirsty savage gloats over a score of victims set in a row for him to decapitate; the Assyrian conqueror's reward for all the hardship and risk of a campaign, was the power of hacking down the fettered prisoners of war until the physical power to slaughter was exhausted: and there is a survival of the same passion when a modern "sportsman" spends quite a