In the intimate connection of religion with life all primitive interests are placed under its sanction. A large portion of time is occupied with its ceremonials. The fortunes of the tribe are bound up with it. To the bounty of its powers they owe abundant food and safety or success in war. Beneath its protection the newly born enter the world, and to its care the elders are committed when they die. Its holy persons rule in their midst; its holy places are all round about them; its sacred objects are in their homes. It is not surprising, therefore, that all the higher possessions of the tribe, its arts and crafts, its traditions, its customs and laws, its stories of the gods and their dealings with each other or with man, should be ascribed to the same origin. Where individuality is hampered at every turn by time-honoured conventions, and personal initiative is imperfectly developed and timidly confined within the narrowest limits, all higher intellectual products, command over nature, inventions, poetry and song, the usages of {171} the social order, and the rituals for serving the gods, carry with them a secret force, a mysterious authority, which passes the bounds of human wisdom, and has been imparted from some higher source. Each man is dimly conscious that his single wit could not have compassed these things; he does not observe the long processes and imperceptible stages of advance; he accepts the theory offered to him by those who should know best, and looks back to the days when kindly powers took in hand the instruction of men. Thus at the present day many of the Australian tribes whose condition has probably changed little since the date of the oldest civilisations of antiquity, regard their scanty institutions as ordained by beings above. Ask the Narrinyeri why they adhere to any custom, the answer is that Nurrundere commanded it. Baiame and Bunjil laid down the marriage laws for their respective tribes; Bunjil, moreover, taught the Kulin the arts of life; and Daramulun gave the Yuin laws which the old people handed down from generation to generation. The elaborate cultures of Babylonia and Egypt claimed similar origins. In the vast prehistoric period before the Flood the people round the lower Euphrates had lived without rule or order, like the beasts of the field, till a wondrous Fish-Man, whom the Greek historian called Cannes, appeared out of the Persian Gulf with wisdom from the sea. He {172} taught them arts and laws, and wrote concerning the generation of mankind, their different ways of life, and their civil polity. It was no other than Ea, god of the encircling Deep, the source of all. Historic inscriptions told of his "books," which may have included ancient oracles, and which certainly laid down the duties of a king. So the famous code of Hammurabi (about 1950 B.C.), recently discovered at Susa (1901), was handed to him, as the tablet shows, by the great Sun-god, Shamash.