incrusted, must not be held to be settled in the affirmative because these traces of them exist. Instead of being survivals which they have not yet sloughed off or outgrown, they may be parasitical growths indicating degradation and disease. Though the researches hitherto prosecuted have not resulted in the discovery of a law regulating the development of religion,[53] they all point to a common religious faculty peculiar to man, and indicate that the religious instinct is co-extensive with the human race. Nothing, it is true, in the nature of things forbids the discovery of tribes absolutely without religion; but as matter of fact, no such have been found. And as Tylor remarks, “those who assert the contrary disprove their theories by the facts which they allege in support of them.”[54] Now, if we find in all sections of humanity, even far apart from each other, the same groping after an Author and Governor of our being, and the same forecasting of our destiny, though in most contradictory, and, alas! often fearfully perverted ways, we may safely infer as a fundamental truth that humanity, though broken up into many fragments, is really an organic unity, and that the Christian dogma simply expresses a scientific fact, “that God hath made of one all nations on the face of the earth.” If the organic unity of humanity be granted, the organic unity of language and of religion too would seem to be deducible from it as simple corollaries. But we must be careful in defining wherein this organic unity consists. We may assume that in regard to language it does not consist in a perfect primitive speech, broken up at later times into numberless forms to be used richly and copiously by some civilised, but scantily by barbarous peoples.[55] In regard to religion it does not mean a complete compendium of truth supernaturally given to the fathers of the human race, from which, while all men have erred more or less, some have fearfully fallen away. Such a view, though held generally once, would be condemned by Christian theologians now as irreligious in principle, for it would seek for the roots of religion not in the nature of man, but in some external enactment, and would make religion, which is essentially spontaneous, to be something mechanical or compulsory in action.[56] The unity of language does not consist in a common vocabulary, but in a common faculty which all men have of expressing their feelings and their thoughts; and the unity of religion does not consist in a number of fundamental beliefs which all men have in common; but in the universal instinct to believe in, and reverence and obey, a power higher and better than ourselves. The faculty, the instinct in each case is one; yet it has been developed, if we are to use that word, in very different degrees. In some tribes the faculty of reckoning is so weak, that they have numerals only to five, and their vocabulary is so poor as to express only objects around them or their own sensuous wants.