With these axioms well in mind, we can advance with confidence to examine the claims of a religion. It will rise in the scale just in proportion as its behests, were they universally adopted, would permanently increase the happiness of the human race. In their origin, as I have said, morality and religion are opposites; but they are opposites which inevitably attract and unite. The first lesson of all religions is that we gain by giving, that to secure any end we must sacrifice something. This, too, is taught by all social intercourse, and, therefore, an acute German psychologist has set up the formula," All manners are moral,"[1] because they all imply a subjection of the personal will of the individual to the general will of those who surround him, as expressed in usage and custom. [Footnote 1: "Alle Sitten sind sittlich." Lazarus, _Ursprung der Sitte_, S. 5, quoted by Roskoff. I hardly need mention that our word _morality_, from _mos_, means by etymology, simply what is customary and of current usage. The moral man is he who conforms himself to the opinions of the majority. This is also at the basis of Robert Browning's definition of a people: "A people is but the attempt of many to rise to the completer life of one" (_A Soul's Tragedy_).] Even the religion which demands bloody sacrifices, which forces its votaries to futile and abhorrent rites, is at least training its adherents in the virtues of obedience and renunciation, in endurance and confidence. But concerning American religions I need not have recourse to such a questionable vindication. They held in them far nobler elements, as is proved beyond cavil by the words of many of the earliest missionaries themselves. Bigoted and bitter haters of the native faiths, as they were, they discovered in them so much that was good, so much that approximated to the purer doctrines that they themselves came to teach, that they have left on record many an attempt to prove that there must, in some remote and unknown epoch, have come Christian teachers to the New World, St. Thomas, St. Bartholomew, monks from Ireland, or Asiatic disciples, to acquaint the natives with such salutary doctrines. It is precisely in connection with the myths which I have been relating in this volume that these theories were put forth, and I have referred to them in various passages. The facts are as stated, but the credit of developing these elevated moral conceptions must not be refused to the red race. They are its own property, the legitimate growth of its own religious sense.