[Footnote 2: See on this subject Prof. Edward Caird's Gifford Lectures, _The Evolution of Religion_, 1893. Galloway, _The Principles of Religious Development_.] The whole of the early world did entertain such a belief. This is the first and the most important instance of uniformity of thought at a stage through which every nation once passed; all men at that stage believe in gods. We will not refuse the name of religion to this side of savage life, even should the needs be low and material which send the savage to his god, though his god be a being who in us would excite the very opposite of reverence, and though his treatment of his god be far from what to us seems worthy, or even though he strove to appease a multitude of spirits which he conceived as flitting about him, before he came to form a settled relation of confidence with one being whom he took for his own god. Where the sense of need has sent a human being to hold intercourse with a higher power, there we hold religion is making its appearance. And if this is universally the case among men at the savage stage, then religion is universal among the ancestors of all nations; it did not need to be invented when kings and priests appeared and wanted it as an instrument for their own purposes; it was there before there were any kings or priests, and is an inheritance which has come down to all mankind from the time when human intelligence first turned to the effort to understand the world. BOOKS RECOMMENDED _For this and the three following chapters_ J. B. Tylor, _Anthropology_, Third Edition, 1891. J. B. Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, Fourth Edition, 1903. Frazer, _The Golden Bough_, Third Edition, 1900. A new edition is now appearing in parts. A. Lang, _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_, new edition, 1899. Th. Achelis, in De la Saussaye. Waitz und Gerland, _Anthropologie der Naturvoelker_, 1859-72. Brinton, _Religions of Primitive Peoples_, 1897. The reports of travellers and missionaries are, of course, important. CHAPTER III THE EARLIEST OBJECTS OF WORSHIP