XI. RITUAL DANCING

It is unnecessary to labor the conclusion of the last two

or three chapters, namely that Christianity grew out of the

former Pagan Creeds and is in its general outlook and

origins continuous and of one piece with them. I have

not attempted to bring together ALL the evidence in favor

of this contention, as such work would be too vast, but more

illustrations of its truth will doubtless occur to readers, or

will emerge as we proceed.

I think we may take it as proved (1) that from the earliest

ages, and before History, a great body of religious belief

and ritual--first appearing among very primitive and

unformed folk, whom we should call 'savages'--has come

slowly down, broadening and differentiating itself on the

way into a great variety of forms, but embodying always

certain main ideas which became in time the accepted

doctrines of the later Churches--the Indian, the

Egyptian, the Mithraic, the Christian, and so forth. What

these ideas in their general outline have been we can

perhaps best judge from our "Apostles' Creed," as it is

recited every Sunday in our churches.

"I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven

and earth: And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord, who

was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin

Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead

and buried. He descended into Hell; the third day he rose

again from the dead, He ascended into heaven, and

sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from

thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. I

believe in the Holy Ghost; the holy Catholic Church;

the communion of Saints; the Forgiveness of sins; the

Resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen."

Here we have the All-Father and Creator, descending from

the Sky in the form of a spirit to impregnate the earthly

Virgin-mother, who thus gives birth to a Saviour-hero.

The latter is slain by the powers of Evil, is buried and

descends into the lower world, but arises again as God

into heaven and becomes the leader and judge of mankind.

We have the confirmation of the Church (or,

in earlier times, of the Tribe) by means of a Eucharist

or Communion which binds together all the members,

living or dead, and restores errant individuals through

the Sacrifice of the hero and the Forgiveness of their sins;

and we have the belief in a bodily Resurrection and continued

life of the members within the fold of the Church

(or Tribe), itself regarded as eternal.

One has only, instead of the word 'Jesus,' to read Dionysus

or Krishna or Hercules or Osiris or Attis, and instead

of 'Mary' to insert Semele or Devaki or Alcmene

or Neith or Nana, and for Pontius Pilate to use the name

of any terrestrial tyrant who comes into the corresponding

story, and lo! the creed fits in all particulars into the

rites and worship of a pagan god. I need not enlarge

upon a thesis which is self-evident from all that has gone

before. I do not say, of course, that ALL the religious

beliefs of Paganism are included and summarized in our

Apostles' Creed, for--as I shall have occasion to note in the

next chapter--I think some very important religious elements

are there OMITTED; but I do think that all the beliefs which

ARE summarized in the said creed had already been fully

represented and elaborately expressed in the non-Christian

religions and rituals of Paganism.

Further (2) I think we may safely say that there is no

certain proof that the body of beliefs just mentioned sprang

from any one particular centre far back and radiated thence

by dissemination and mental contagion over the rest of the

world; but the evidence rather shows that these beliefs

were, for the most part, the SPONTANEOUS outgrowths (in

various localities) of the human mind at certain stages of

its evolution; that they appeared, in the different races

and peoples, at different periods according to the degree

of evolution, and were largely independent of intercourse

and contagion, though of course, in cases, considerably

influenced by it; and that one great and all-important

occasion and provocative of these beliefs was actually

the RISE OF SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS--that is, the coming of the

mind to a more or less distinct awareness of itself and of its

own operation, and the consequent development and growth

of Individualism, and of the Self-centred attitude in human

thought and action.

In the third place (3) I think we may see--and this is the

special subject of the present chapter--that at a very early

period, when humanity was hardly capable of systematic

expression in what we call Philosophy or Science,

it could not well rise to an ordered and literary expression

of its beliefs, such as we find in the later religions and

the 'Churches' (Babylonian, Jewish, East Indian, Christian,

or what-not), and yet that it FELT these beliefs very intensely

and was urged, almost compelled, to their utterance in

some form or other. And so it came about that people

expressed themselves in a vast mass of ritual and myth--

customs, ceremonies, legends, stories--which on account

of their popular and concrete form were handed down

for generations, and some of which linger on still in the

midst of our modern civilization. These rituals and legends

were, many of them, absurd enough, rambling and childish

in character, and preposterous in conception, yet they gave

the expression needed; and some of them of course, as we

have seen, were full of meaning and suggestion.

A critical and commercial Civilization, such as ours,

in which (notwithstanding much TALK about Art) the artistic

sense is greatly lacking, or at any rate but little diffused,

does not as a rule understand that poetic RITES,

in the evolution of peoples, came naturally before anything

like ordered poems or philosophy or systematized VIEWS

about life and religion--such as WE love to wallow in!

Things were FELT before they were spoken. The loading

of diseases into disease-boats, of sins onto scape-goats, the

propitiation of the forces of nature by victims, human or

animal, sacrifices, ceremonies of re-birth, eucharistic feasts,

sexual communions, orgiastic celebrations of the common

life, and a host of other things--all SAID plainly enough what

was meant, but not in WORDS. Partly no doubt it was

that at some early time words were more difficult of

command and less flexible in use than actions (and at

all times are they not less expressive?). Partly it was

that mankind was in the child-stage. The Child delights

in ritual, in symbol, in expression through material objects

and actions:

 See, at his feet some little plan or chart,

 Some fragment from his dream of human life,

 Shaped by himself with newly learned art;

     A wedding or a festival,

     A mourning or a funeral;

          And this hath now his heart.

And primitive man in the child-stage felt a positive joy in

ritual celebrations, and indulged in expressions which we but

little understand; for these had then his heart.

One of the most pregnant of these expressions was DANCING.

Children dance instinctively. They dance with rage;

they dance with joy, with sheer vitality; they dance

with pain, or sometimes with savage glee at the suffering

of others; they delight in mimic combats, or in

animal plays and disguises. There are such things as

Courting-dances, when the mature male and female go

through a ritual together--not only in civilized ball-rooms

and the back-parlors of inns, but in the farmyards where

the rooster pays his addresses to the hen, or the yearling

bull to the cow--with quite recognized formalities; there

are elaborate ceremonials performed by the Australian

bower-birds and many other animals. All these things--

at any rate in children and animals--come before speech;

and anyhow we may say that LOVE-RITES, even in mature

and civilized man, hardly ADMIT of speech. Words only

vulgarize love and blunt its edge.

So Dance to the savage and the early man was not merely

an amusement or a gymnastic exercise (as the books

often try to make out), but it was also a serious

and intimate part of life, an expression of religion

and the relation of man to non-human Powers. Imagine

a young dancer--and the admitted age for ritual dancing

was commonly from about eighteen to thirty--coming

forward on the dancing-ground or platform for the

INVOCATION OF RAIN. We have unfortunately no kinematic

records, but it is not impossible or very difficult to imagine

the various gestures and movements which might be considered

appropriate to such a rite in different localities

or among different peoples. A modern student of Dalcroze

Eurhythmics would find the problem easy. After a time

a certain ritual dance (for rain) would become stereotyped

and generally adopted. Or imagine a young Greek leading an

invocation to Apollo to STAY SOME PLAGUE which was

ravaging the country. He might as well be accompanied

by a small body of co-dancers; but he would be the leader

and chief representative. Or it might be a WAR-DANCE--

as a more or less magical preparation for the raid or foray.

We are familiar enough with accounts of war-dances among

American Indians. C. O. Muller in his History and Antiquities

of the Doric Race[1] gives the following account of

the Pyrrhic dance among the Greeks, which was danced in

full armor:--"Plato says that it imitated all the

attitudes of defence, by avoiding a thrust or a cast, retreating,

springing up, and crouching-as also the opposite

movements of attack with arrows and lances, and also

of every kind of thrust. So strong was the attachment

to this dance at Sparta that, long after it had in the other

Greek states degenerated into a Bacchanalian revel, it was

still danced by the Spartans as a warlike exercise, and

boys of fifteen were instructed in it." Of the Hunting-

dance I have already given instances.[2] It always had

the character of Magic about it, by which the game or

quarry might presumably be influenced; and it can easily

be understood that if the Hunt was not successful the blame

might well be attributed to some neglect of the usual

ritual mimes or movements--no laughing matter for the

leader of the dance.

[1] Book IV, ch. 6, Section 7.

[2] See also Winwood Reade's Savage Africa, ch. xviii, in which

he speaks of the "gorilla dance," before hunting gorillas, as a

"religious festival."

Or there were dances belonging to the ceremonies of

Initiation--dances both by the initiators and the initiated. Jane

E. Harrison in Themis (p. 24) says, "Instruction among

savage peoples is always imparted in more or less mimetic

dances. At initiation you learn certain dances

which confer on you definite social status. When a man

is too old to dance, he hands over his dance to another

and a younger, and he then among some tribes ceases

to exist socially. . . . The dances taught to boys at

initiation are frequently if not always ARMED dances. These

are not necessarily warlike. The accoutrement of spear

and shield was in part decorative, in part a provision for

making the necessary hubbub." (Here Miss Harrison

reproduces a photograph of an Initiation dance among

the Akikuyu of British East Africa.) The Initiation-

dances blend insensibly and naturally with the Mystery

and Religion dances, for indeed initiation was for the most

part an instruction in the mysteries and social rites of

the Tribe. They were the expression of things which

would be hard even for us, and which for rude folk would

be impossible, to put into definite words. Hence arose

the expression--whose meaning has been much discussed

by the learned--"to dance out (<gr ezorceisqai>) a mystery."[1]

Lucian, in a much-quoted passage,[2] observes: "You cannot

find a single ancient mystery in which there is not dancing

. . . and this much all men know, that most people say of

the revealers of the mysteries that they 'dance them

out.' " Andrew Lang, commenting on this passage,[3]

continues: "Clement of Alexandria uses the same term when

speaking of his own 'appalling revelations.' So closely

connected are mysteries with dancing among savages that

when Mr. Orpen asked Qing, the Bushman hunter, about

some doctrines in which Qing was not initiated, he said:

'Only the initiated men of that dance know these things.'

To 'dance' this or that means to be acquainted with this

or that myth, which is represented in a dance or ballet d'action.

So widely distributed is the practice that Acosta in an

interesting passage mentions it as familiar to the people

of Peru before and after the Spanish conquest." [And

we may say that when the 'mysteries' are of a sexual nature

it can easily be understood that to 'dance them out'

is the only way of explaining them!]

[1] Meaning apparently either simply to represent, or, sometimes

to DIVULGE, a mystery.

[2] <gr peri 'Orchsews>, Ch. xv. 277.

[3] Myth, Ritual and Religion, i, 272.

Thus we begin to appreciate the serious nature and the

importance of the dance among primitive folk. To dub

a youth "a good dancer" is to pay him a great compliment.

Among the well-known inscriptions on the rocks in the

island of Thera in the Aegean sea there are many which

record in deeply graven letters the friendship and devotion

to each other of Spartan warrior-comrades; it seems

strange at first to find how often such an epithet of

praise occurs as Bathycles DANCES WELL, Eumelos is a PERFECT

DANCER (<gr aristos orcestas>). One hardly in general expects

one warrior to praise another for his dancing! But when

one realizes what is really meant--namely the fitness of

the loved comrade to lead in religious and magical rituals

--then indeed the compliment takes on a new complexion.

Religious dances, in dedication to a god, have of course been

honored in every country. Muller, in the work just

cited,[1] describes a lively dance called the hyporchema

which, accompanied by songs, was used in the worship

of Apollo. "In this, besides the chorus of singers who

usually danced around THE BLAZING ALTAR, several persons

were appointed to accompany the action of the poem

with an appropriate pantomimic display." It was probably

some similar dance which is recorded in Exodus,

ch. xxxii, when Aaron made the Israelites a golden Calf

(image of the Egyptian Apis). There was an altar and a

fire and burnt offerings for sacrifice, and the people dancing

around. Whether in the Apollo ritual the dancers were

naked I cannot say, but in the affair of the golden Calf

they evidently were, for it will be remembered that it

was just this which upset Moses' equanimity so badly--

"when he SAW THAT THE PEOPLE WERE NAKED"--and led to the

breaking of the two tables of stone and the slaughter of

some thousands of folk. It will be remembered also that David on

a sacrificial occasion danced naked before the Lord.[2]

[1] Book II, ch. viii, Section 14.

[2] 2 Sam. vi.

It may seem strange that dances in honor of a god should

be held naked; but there is abundant evidence that this

was frequently the case, and it leads to an interesting

speculation. Many of these rituals undoubtedly owed their

sanctity and solemnity to their extreme antiquity. They

came down in fact from very far back times when

the average man or woman--as in some of the Central

African tribes to-day--wore simply nothing at all; and

like all religious ceremonies they tended to preserve their

forms long after surrounding customs and conditions had

altered. Consequently nakedness lingered on in sacrificial

and other rites into periods when in ordinary life it

had come to be abandoned or thought indecent and shameful.

This comes out very clearly in both instances above--

quoted from the Bible. For in Exodus xxxii. 25 it is said

that "Aaron had made them (the dancers) naked UNTO THEIR

SHAME among their enemies (READ opponents)," and in 2

Sam. vi. 20 we are told that Michal came out and sarcastically

rebuked the "glorious king of Israel" for "shamelessly

uncovering himself, like a vain fellow" (for which

rebuke, I am sorry to say, David took a mean revenge

on Michal). In both cases evidently custom had so

far changed that to a considerable section of the population

these naked exhibitions had become indecent, though

as parts of an acknowledged ritual they were still retained

and supported by others. The same conclusion may be derived

from the commands recorded in Exodus xx. 26 and

xxviii. 42, that the priests be not "uncovered" before the

altar--commands which would hardly have been needed had

not the practice been in vogue.

Then there were dances (partly magical or religious) performed

at rustic and agricultural festivals, like the Epilenios,

celebrated in Greece at the gathering of the grapes.[1]

Of such a dance we get a glimpse in the Bible (Judges xxi.

20) when the elders advised the children of Benjamin to go

out and lie in wait in the vineyards, at the time of the

yearly feast; and "when the daughters of Shiloh come out

to dance in the dances, then come ye out of the vineyards

and catch you every man a wife from the daughters of

Shiloh"--a touching example apparently of early so-called

'marriage by capture'! Or there were dances, also partly

or originally religious, of a quite orgiastic and Bacchanalian

character, like the Bryallicha performed in Sparta by

men and women in hideous masks, or the Deimalea by

Sileni and Satyrs waltzing in a circle; or the Bibasis

carried out by both men and women--a quite gymnastic

exercise in which the performers took a special pride in striking

their own buttocks with their heels! or others wilder

still, which it would perhaps not be convenient to

describe.

[1] <gr Epilhnioi umnoi>:  hymns sung over the winepress

(Dictionary).

We must see how important a part Dancing played in

that great panorama of Ritual and Religion (spoken of in

the last chapter) which, having originally been led up to

by the 'Fall of Man,' has ever since the dawn of history

gradually overspread the world with its strange procession

of demons and deities, and its symbolic representations

of human destiny. When it is remembered that ritual

dancing was the matrix out of which the Drama sprang,

and further that the drama in its inception (as still to-day

in India) was an affair of religion and was acted in, or in

connection with, the Temples, it becomes easier to understand

how all this mass of ceremonial sacrifices, expiations,

initiations, Sun and Nature festivals, eucharistic and orgiastic

communions and celebrations, mystery-plays, dramatic

representations, myths and legends, etc., which I have touched

upon in the preceding chapters--together with all the

emotions, the desires, the fears, the yearnings and the

wonderment which they represented--have practically sprung

from the same root: a root deep and necessary in the

psychology of Man. Presently I hope to show that they

will all practically converge again in the end to one

meaning, and prepare the way for one great Synthesis to

come--an evolution also necessary and inevitable in human

psychology.

In that truly inspired Ode from which I quoted a few

pages back, occur those well-known words whose repetition

now will, on account of their beauty, I am sure be excused:--

 Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

 The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,

     Hath had elsewhere its setting,

          And cometh from afar;

     Not in entire forgetfulness,

     And not in utter nakedness,

 But trailing clouds of glory do we come

     From God, who is our home:

 Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

 Shades of the prison-house begin to close

     Upon the growing Boy,

 But He beholds the light and whence it flows

     He sees it in his joy;

 The youth who daily farther from the east

     Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,

     And by the vision splendid

     Is on his way attended;

 At length the man perceives it die away

 And fade into the light of common day.

Wordsworth--though he had not the inestimable advantage

of a nineteenth-century education and the inheritance

of the Darwinian philosophy--does nevertheless put

the matter of the Genius of the Child in a way which

(with the alteration of a few conventional terms) we scientific

moderns are quite inclined to accept. We all admit now

that the Child does not come into the world with a mental

tabula rasa of entire forgetfulness but on the contrary

as the possessor of vast stores of sub-conscious memory, derived

from its ancestral inheritances; we all admit that a certain

grace and intuitive insight and even prophetic quality, in

the child-nature, are due to the harmonization of these racial

inheritances in the infant, even before it is born; and

that after birth the impact of the outer world serves

rather to break up and disintegrate this harmony than

to confirm and strengthen it. Some psychologists indeed

nowadays go so far as to maintain that the child is not

only 'Father of the man,' but superior to the man,[1] and

that Boyhood and Youth and Maturity are attained to not

by any addition but by a process of loss and subtraction.

It will be seen that the last ten lines of the above quotation

rather favor this view.

[1] Man in the course of his life falls away more and more from

the specifically HUMAN type of his early years, but the Ape in

the course of his short life goes very much farther along the

road of degradation and premature senility." (Man and Woman, by

Havelock Ellis, p. 24).

But my object in making the quotation was not to insist

on the truth of its application to the individual Child, but

rather to point out the remarkable way in which it illustrates

what I have said about the Childhood of the Race. In fact,

if the quotation be read over again with this interpretation

(which I do not say Wordsworth intended) that the 'birth'

spoken of is the birth or evolution of the distinctively self-

conscious Man from the Animals and the animal-natured,

unself-conscious human beings of a preceding age, then the

parable unfolds itself perfectly naturally and convincingly.

THAT birth certainly was sleep and a forgetting; the grace

and intuition and instinctive perfection of the animals

was lost. But the forgetfulness was not entire; the

memory lingered long of an age of harmony, of an Eden-

garden left behind. And trailing clouds of this remembrance

the first tribal men, on the edge of but not yet WITHIN the

civilization-period, appear in the dawn of History.

As I have said before, the period of the dawn of Self-

consciousness was also the period of the dawn of the practical

and inquiring Intellect; it was the period of the babyhood

of both; and so we perceive among these early people (as

we also do among children) that while in the main the heart

and the intuitions were right, the intellect was for

a long period futile and rambling to a degree. As soon as

the mind left the ancient bases of instinct and sub-conscious

racial experience it fell into a hopeless bog, out of which

it only slowly climbed by means of the painfully-gathered

stepping-stones of logic and what we call Science. "Heaven

lies about us in our infancy." Wordsworth perceived

that wonderful world of inner experience and glory out of

which the child emerges; and some even of us may perceive

that similar world in which the untampered animals STILL

dwell, and OUT of which self-regarding Man in the history

of the race was long ago driven. But a curse went with

the exile. As the Brain grew, the Heart withered. The

inherited instincts and racially accumulated wisdom, on

which the first men thrived and by means of which they

achieved a kind of temporary Paradise, were broken up;

delusions and disease and dissension set in. Cain turned

upon his brother and slew him; and the shades of the prison-

house began to close. The growing Boy, however, (by

whom we may understand the early tribes of Mankind)

had yet a radiance of Light and joy in his life; and the

Youth--though travelling daily farther from the East--still

remained Nature's priest, and by the vision splendid was on

his way attended: but

     At length the Man perceived it die away.

     And fade into the light of common day.

What a strangely apt picture in a few words (if we like to

take it so) of the long pilgrimage of the Human Race,

its early and pathetic clinging to the tradition of the Eden-

garden, its careless and vigorous boyhood, its meditative

youth, with consciousness of sin and endless expiatory

ritual in Nature's bosom, its fleeting visions of salvation, and

finally its complete disillusionment and despair in the world-

slaughter and unbelief of the twentieth century!

Leaving Wordsworth, however, and coming back to our

main line of thought, we may point out that while early

peoples were intellectually mere babies--with their endless

yarns about heroes on horseback leaping over wide rivers

or clouds of monks flying for hundreds of miles through the

air, and their utter failure to understand the general

concatenations of cause and effect--yet practically and in their

instinct of life and destiny they were, as I have already

said, by no means fools; certainly not such fools as many

of the arm-chair students of these things delight to represent

them. For just as, a few years ago, we modern civilizees

studying outlying nations, the Chinese for instance, rejoiced

(in our vanity) to pick out every quaint peculiarity and

absurdity and monstrosity of a supposed topsyturvydom, and

failed entirely to see the real picture of a great and eminently

sensible people; so in the case of primitive men we

have been, and even still are, far too prone to catalogue

their cruelties and obscenities and idiotic superstitions,

and to miss the sane and balanced setting of their actual lives.

Mr. R. R. Marett, who has a good practical acquaintance

with his subject, had in the Hibbert Journal for October 1918

an article on "The Primitive Medicine Man" in which he

shows that the latter is as a rule anything but a fool and

a knave--although like 'medicals' in all ages he hocuspocuses

his patients occasionally! He instances the medicine-

man's excellent management, in most cases, of childbirth,

or of wounds and fractures, or his primeval skill in trepanning

or trephining--all of which operations, he admits, may

be accompanied with grotesque and superstitious ceremonies,

yet show real perception and ability. We all

know--though I think the article does not mention the matter--

what a considerable list there is of drugs and herbs which

the modern art of healing owes to the ancient medicine-man,

and it may be again mentioned that one of the most up-to-

date treatments--the use of a prolonged and exclusive diet of

MILK as a means of giving the organism a new start in severe

cases--has really come down to us through the ages from

this early source.[1] The real medicine-man, Mr. Marett

says, is largely a 'faith-healer' and 'soul-doctor'; he believes

in his vocation, and undergoes much for the sake of

it: "The main point is to grasp that by his special

initiation and the rigid taboos which he practises--not

to speak of occasional remarkable gifts, say of trance and

ecstasy, which he may inherit by nature and have improved

by art--he HAS access to a wonder-working power. . . .

And the great need of primitive folk is for this healer of

souls." Our author further insists on the enormous play

and influence of Fear in the savage mind--a point we have

touched on already--and gives instances of Thanatomania,

or cases where, after a quite slight and superficial wound,

the patient becomes so depressed that he, quite needlessly,

persists in dying! Such cases, obviously, can only be countered

by Faith, or something (whatever it may be) which

restores courage, hope and energy to the mind. Nor need

I point out that the situation is exactly the same among

a vast number of 'patients' to-day. As to the value, in

his degree, of the medicine-man many modern observers and

students quite agree with the above.[2] Also as the present

chapter is on Ritual Dancing it may not be out of place

to call attention to the supposed healing of sick people in

Ceylon and other places by Devil-dancing--the enormous

output of energy and noise in the ritual possibly having the

effect of reanimating the patient (if it does not kill

him), or of expelling the disease from his organism.

[1] Milk ("fast-milk" or vrata) was, says Mr. Hewitt, the only

diet in the Soma-sacrifice. See Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times

(preface). The Soma itself was a fermented drink prepared with

ceremony from the milky and semen-like sap of certain plants, and

much used in sacrificial offerings. (See Monier-Williams.

Sanskrit Dictionary.)

[2] See Winwood Reade (Savage Africa), Salamon Reinach (Cults,

Myths and Religions), and others.

With regard to the practical intelligence of primitive

peoples, derived from their close contact with life and

nature, Bishop Colenso's experiences among the Zulus may

appropriately be remembered. When expounding the Bible

to these supposedly backward 'niggers' he was met at all

points by practical interrogations and arguments which he

was perfectly unable to answer--especially over the recorded

passage of the Red Sea by the Israelites in a single night.

From the statistics given in the Sacred Book these naughty

savages proved to him absolutely conclusively that the numbers

of fugitives were such that even supposing them

to have marched--men, women and children--FIVE ABREAST

and in close order, they would have formed a column 100

miles long, and this not including the baggage, sheep

and cattle! Of course the feat was absolutely impossible.

They could not have passed the Red Sea in a night or a

week of nights.

But the sequel is still more amusing and instructive.

Colenso, in his innocent sincerity, took the side of the Zulus,

and feeling sure the Church at home would be quite glad to

have its views with regard to the accuracy of Bible statistics

corrected, wrote a book embodying the amendments needed.

Modest as his criticisms were, they raised a STORM of protest

and angry denunciation, which even led to his deposition

for the time being from his bishopric! While at the same

time an avalanche of books to oppose his heresy poured

forth from the press. Lately I had the curiosity to look

through the British Museum catalogue and found that

in refutation of Colenso's Pentateuch Examined some 140

(a hundred and forty) volumes were at that time published!

To-day, I need hardly say, all these arm-chair critics and

their works have sunk into utter obscurity, but the arguments

of the Zulus and their Bishop still stand unmoved and immovable.

This is a case of searching intelligence shown by 'savages,'

an intelligence founded on intimate knowledge of the needs

of actual life. I think we may say that a, similarly instinctive

intelligence (sub-conscious if you like) has guided the tribes

of men on the whole in their long passage through the Red

Sea of the centuries, from those first days of which I

speak even down to the present age, and has in some strange,

even if fitful, way kept them along the path of that final

emancipation towards which Humanity is inevitably moving.