The workings of this law can be traced even in the case of the savage tribes of our own day. Of the African negroes, P. Bandin says that "their traditions and religious doctrines ... show clearly that they are a people in decadence.... They have an obscure and confused idea of the only God, .... who no longer receives worship." (_"Fetichism,"_ p. 7-10.) Winwood Reade testifies: "The negroes possess the remnants of a noble and sublime religion, though they have forgotten its precepts and debased its ceremonies." They still retain a recollection "of God, the Supreme, the Creator." Concerning the Zulus, Bastian records that they informed him that "their ancestors possessed the knowledge of .... that _source of being_ which is above, which gives life to men." (_"Vorgeschichtliche Schoepfungslieder."_) A missionary of the Lutheran General Synod, Rev. J. C. Pedersen, wrote in _"Lutheran Observer,"_ August, 1910, concerning the African natives that they still have a considerable display of religion, but "ask him, who is the God in whom you trust? what do you mean by trusting? how can he help you? and he will answer, 'I don't know, but the old people used to say so, and taught us to say so.'" John Hanning Speke, in his _"Journal of the Discovery of the Sources of the Nile"_ records reminiscences among the degraded savages among whom he dwelt, of a supreme God who dwells in heaven, but who no longer received worship. Mungo Park, in the diary of his _"Travels in the Interior of Africa,"_ says that the Mandingoes, a degenerate race of fetish worshippers, still possessed the knowledge of one God, but do not offer up prayers and supplications to him. In the record of his famous circumnavigation of the globe, Captain Cook says that the cannibals of New Zealand still acknowledged a superior being, although their religion was a crude system of spiritualistic practices. Concerning the Koreans Mrs. L. H. Underwood, medical missionary, says that a thousand unworthy deities now crowd the temples, although the great universal Ruler is still worshipped at times, and the "ancient purity of faith and worship has become sadly darkened." The foremost student of modern missions, Johann Warneck, in _"The Living Christ and Dying Heathenism"_ (F. H. Revell Co.,) comes to the conclusion that the Christian religion and its monotheism are not only not a development from lower origins, but that the heathen religions, historically considered, are a degeneracy from a higher knowledge of God. In other words, the application of the doctrine of evolution to the field of comparative religion is a mistake. "Any form of Animism known to me has no lines leading to perfection, but only incontestable marks of degeneration," says the author. "In heathenism the gold of the divine thought becomes dross."