Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/120

of the southern forests, we hear little or nothing of idols. Among the so-called Red Indians of the North, we sometimes find idols worshipped and sacrificed to, but not always, while in Mexico and Peru the whole apparatus of idols, temples, priests, and sacrifices is found in a most complex and elaborate form. It does not seem, indeed, that the growth of the use of images may be taken as any direct measure of the growth of religious ideas, which is complicated with a multitude of other things. Image-worship depends in considerable measure on the representation of ideal beings. In so far as this symbolical element is concerned, it seems that when man has got some way in developing the religious element in him, he begins to catch at the device of setting a puppet or a stone as the symbol and representative of the notions of a higher being which are floating in his mind. He sees in it, as a child does in a doll, a material form which his imagination can clothe with all the attributes of a being which he has never seen, but of whose existence and nature he judges by what he supposes to be its works. He can lodge it in the place of honour, cover it up in the most precious garments, propitiate it with offerings such as would be acceptable to himself. The Christian missionary goes among the heathen to teach the doctrines of a higher religion, and to substitute for the cruder theology of the savage a belief in a God so far beyond human comprehension, that no definition of the Deity is possible to man beyond vague predications, as of infinite power, duration, knowledge, and goodness. It is not perhaps to be wondered at, that the missionary should see nothing in idol-worship but hideous folly and wickedness, and should look upon an idol as a special invention of the devil. He is strengthened, moreover, in such a view by the fact that by the operation of a certain law of the human mind (of which more will be said presently), the idol, which once served a definite and important purpose in the education of the human race, has come to be confounded with the idea of which it was the symbol, and has thus become the parent of the grossest superstition and delusion. But the student who occupies himself in tracing the early stages of human civilization, can see in the rude image of the savage an important aid to early religious development, while it often happens that the missionary