The rather I find, in my own ethnological observations during these more than forty years in direct contact with aboriginal peoples, that the initial starting-point of man's knowledge of God was by revelation from Jehovah himself. This knowledge was to be conserved by man's conscience, God's implanted witness,--a witness that can be coerced into silence, that may be nursed into forgetfulness, that may be perverted by abuse, that may be covered up by superimposed falsities, that may be discolored by the blackness of foul degradation, but which can never be utterly destroyed; which on occasions, like the Titans, arouses itself with volcanic force; which at God's final bar is to be His sufficient proof for the verities and responsibilities of at least natural religion ("natural" religion, a recognition of certain attributes of God as revealed in the works of nature). This knowledge of God, a treasure hid in earthen vessels, rightly used and cherished, was to grow and develop under subsequent divine revelation, so that man might become more and more like his divine original; or, if abused, neglected, or perverted, it would carry him even farther away from God. "Not alone those who insist on the belief that there was a gradual development of the race from a barbarous beginning, but also those who believe that man started on a higher plane, and in his degradation retained vestiges of God's original revelation to him, are finding profit in the study of primitive myths, and of aboriginal rites and ceremonies all the world over."[4] I do not impeach the sincerity of those students of primitive thought who teach that man in his religious beliefs has reached his present monotheism by progressive growths from polytheism, or that he has attained his present conception of the very existence of a Supreme Being by a gradual emergence from a state of ignorance in which even the idea of such a being did not exist; but I do discount the competency of many of the witnesses on whose testimony they base their conclusions. Whatever may be proved in a complete investigation by science into the arcana of nature,--of archæology and other channels of research,--a reverent comparison of these results of finite intelligence will find them not inconsistent with the statements of God's infinite Word. Indeed, that Word was not written to make any definite statement on astronomy or geology, or any other human science. The only science of the Bible is that of man's relation to his divine Father; its only history a history of redemption, as promised to Eve and her seed, the Jewish nation, and as fulfilled in the Lion of the Tribe of Judah. Apparent conflicts of the Bible with science are not always real; too often a claim is set up, based on a single observation, perhaps hastily made, and not verified by a comparison of the variable factors in that observation.