A deeply ingrained tenderness for children, the poetry of a race sensitive to all natural phenomena, the awe born of a consciousness of the mystery and the sorrows of every human life, and the need of something not ourselves, something higher and more helpful than anything earth can give, is the essence of Indian religion, as it is of all our humanity. The Indian worship of spirit is silent and solitary, in temples not made with hands, where all-embracing Nature herself dwells in forest silences, or on heights where sun and wind alone abide. How mistaken and purblind was the assumption of the European that, because these primitive people had not his particular belief, the religion that served them as its substitute was worse than none at all, whereas actually there was within it the elements of the most developed faith—that awe of which Henry Dwight Sedgwick in his “Life of Marcus Aurelius” writes: “Among the qualities that go to make up character a sensitiveness to the feeling of awe is the surest sign of the higher life. It lies deeper than other susceptibilities, sensuous or spiritual.” While allowing that the Indian always was and is to-day a pagan, and that his worship of the countless manifestations of nature must be called superstition, let us admit that this worship is, nevertheless, the honest faith of men who “look not beyond the evidence of the senses,” of which its unquenched and never-to-be quenched altar fire is the eternal symbol, to many a serious student a holier thing than priest-made creeds. Chapter XVI CEREMONIALS AND RITUALS The Pueblo peoples, ancient and modern, grew up under a hard environment; shadowed ever by the specters of famine and thirst, they were exceptionally impressed by the potencies of pitiless nature and the impotency of their own puny power; and, like other risk-haunted folk generally, they developed an elaborate system of ceremonies and symbols designed to placate the mysterious powers.—J. W. POWELL.