The higher forms of animistic religion pass out into polytheisms of more or less dignity. They do not succeed in embodying themselves in permanent literary product, they create no {57} scriptures or sacred books. They have their rude chants, their songs for weddings and funerals, their genealogies and tales of ancient heroes. Strange cosmogonies float from island to island in Polynesia. The Finnic peoples enshrined their faith in the ballads collected under the name of the Kalevala. Among the Indians of North America speculation is sometimes highly elaborated in mythologic tradition; and out of the fusion of nationalities in Mexico rose a developed polytheism in which lofty religious sentiment seems strangely blended with a hideous and sanguinary ritual. Peru, no less, presented to the Spanish conquerors bewildering and incongruous aspects. In these two cultures native American civilisation reached its highest forms. In Mexico the apparatus of religion was very minutely organised. There were immense temples, which required large numbers of priests and servitors. The capital alone is said to have contained 2000 sacred buildings, and the great temple had a staff of 5000 priests. There were religious orders and temple-schools; rites of baptism and circumcision; feasts and sacrifices and sacraments, in which the monkish chroniclers found strange parallels to their own practice. The issues of victory were disastrous. With the death of the last Aztec emperor (1520) the doom of the old gods was assured, and the Inquisition (1571) completed what the sword of Cortes had begun. {58} In the old world Asia has been the mother of religions, but various fates have befallen her offspring. The ancient cults of Babylonia, after an existence longer than the period from Moses to the present day, vanished from the scene. The teachings of Zoroaster were planted in China in A.D. 621, and a temple was erected at the capital, Changan; but the Persian faith could not maintain itself in such a different culture. After the Mohammedan conquest in the eighth century it was finally carried by a little band of exiles into India, and is still cherished by their descendants who bear the name of Parsees. The Jew and the Christian have only a precarious toleration in the land which was once their home. In India and in China alone is the religion of to-day linked in unbroken continuity with the distant past. Islam may set itself in lineal succession to the teachers of old, and claim a place for Mohammed in the sequence of Abraham, Moses, and Christ. But it is the youngest, and in some respects the least original, of the world's great faiths.