Now in anthropology we are always making fresh efforts at the imaginative understanding of men far removed from us, and naturally, therefore, we are always slightly correcting and modifying our conceptions. I want here to suggest that with regard to this Divine King the ordinary classical conception is slightly wrong. We speak of deification; and this deification always remains rather a puzzle for us. It may be all very well for the mysterious Minos: but when applied to Julius Caesar or to Hadrian, in the full light and plain prose of history, it seems such an absurd and gratuitous blasphemy. I think the mistake lies in applying our highly abstract conception ‘God’, a conception rarefied and ennobled during many centuries by the philosophic and religious thought of the highest of mankind, to a stratum of human ideas to which it does not belong. In one of the presidential addresses delivered to the recent Congress of Religions, Mr. Hartland dwelt on a significant fact with regard to this idea of God, viz. that whenever this word is used our best witnesses tend to contradict one another. Among the most competent observers of the Arunta tribes, for instance, some hold that they had no conception of a God, others that they were constantly thinking about God. Much may be said about this; but one thing, I think, emerges with some clearness: that this idea of a god far away in the sky--I do not say merely a god who is ‘without body, parts, or passions’, but even a god who is very remote and is a cause behind the regular phenomena of the world--this idea is one which practically does not enter their minds at all, or, if by an effort they can reach and accept it, it has little working value and is soon forgotten. For most primitive races, I suspect, the medicine-chief, the βασιλεύς, with his immense _mana_, is Theos, and equally the Theos is the medicine-chief. The rainmaker, the bringer of game, the possessor of the power to make dead and to make alive--there he is, the visible doer of all those things which later races have delegated to higher and more shadowy beings, walking palpably before you with his medicine and perhaps his pipe, his grand manner, his fits, and his terrific dress.