These are among the difficulties of the current anthropological theory. There is, however, a solution by which the weakness of the divine conception, its neglected, disused aspect among barbaric races, might be explained by anthropologists, without regarding it as an obsolescent form of a very early idea. This solution is therefore in common use. It is applied to the deity revealed in the ancient mysteries of the Australians, and it is employed in American and African instances. The custom is to say that the highest divine being of American or African native peoples has been borrowed from Europeans, and is, especially, a savage refraction from the God of missionaries. If this can be proved, the shadowy, practically powerless "Master of Life" of certain barbaric peoples, will have degenerated from the Christian conception, because of that conception he will be only a faint unsuccessful refraction. He has been introduced by Europeans, it is argued, but is not in harmony with his new environment, and so is "half-remembered and half forgot". The hypothesis of borrowing admits of only one answer, but that answer should be conclusive. If we can discover, say in North America, a single instance in which the supreme being occurs, while yet he cannot possibly be accounted for by any traceable or verifiable foreign influence, then the burden of proof, in other cases, falls on the opponent. When he urges that other North American supreme beings were borrowed, we can reply that our crucial example shows that this need not be the fact. To prove that it is the fact, in his instances, is then his business. It is obvious that for information on this subject we must go to the reports of the earliest travellers who knew the Red Indians well. We must try to get at gods behind any known missionary efforts. Mr. Tylor offers us the testimony of Heriot, about 1586, that the natives of Virginia believed in many gods, also in one chief god, "who first made other principal gods, and then the sun, moon and stars as petty gods".(1) Whence could the natives of Virginia have borrowed this notion of a Creator before 1586? If it is replied, in the usual way, that they developed him upwards out of sun, moon and star gods, other principal gods, and finally reached the idea of the Creator, we answer that the idea of the Maker is found where these alleged intermediate stages are NOT found, as in Australia. In Virginia then, as in Victoria, a Creator may have been evolved in some other way than that of gradual ascent from ghosts, and may have been, as in Australia and elsewhere, prior to verifiable ghost-worship. Again, in Virginia at our first settlement, the native priests strenuously resisted the introduction of Christianity. They were content with their deity, Ahone, "the great God who governs all the world, and makes the sun to shine, creating the moon and stars his companions.... The good and peaceable God... needs not to be sacrificed