The shadow-figures of the creeds and theogonies pass away truly like ephemeral dreams; but to say that time spent in their study is wasted, is a mistake, for they have value as being indications of things much more real than themselves, namely, of the stages of evolution of the human mind. The fact that a certain god-figure, however grotesque and queer, or a certain creed, however childish, cruel, and illogical, held sway for a considerable time over the hearts of men in any corner or continent of the world is good evidence that it represented a real formative urge at the time in the hearts of those good people, and a definite stage in their evolution and the evolution of humanity. Certainly it was destined to pass away, but it was a step, and a necessary step in the great process; and certainly it was opaque and brutish, but it is through the opaque things of the world, and not through the transparent, that we become aware of the light. It may be worth while to give instances of how some early rituals and creeds, in themselves apparently barbarous or preposterous, were really the indications of important moral and social conceptions evolving in the heart of man. Let us take, first, the religious customs connected with the ideas of Sacrifice and of Sin, of which such innumerable examples are now to be found in the modern books on Anthropology. If we assume, as I have done more than once, that the earliest state of Man was one in which he did not consciously separate himself from the world, animate and inanimate, which surrounded him, then (as I have also said) it was perfectly natural for him to take some animal which bulked large on his horizon--some food-animal for instance--and to pay respect to it as the benefactor of his tribe, its far-back ancestor and totem-symbol; or, seeing the boundless blessing of the cornfields, to believe in some kind of spirit of the corn (not exactly a god but rather a magical ghost) which, reincarnated every year, sprang up to save mankind from famine. But then no sooner had he done this than he was bound to perceive that in cutting down the corn or in eating his totem-bear or kangaroo he was slaying his own best self and benefactor. In that instant the consciousness of DISUNITY, the sense of sin in some undefined yet no less disturbing and alarming form would come in. If, before, his ritual magic had been concentrated on the simple purpose of multiplying the animal or, vegetable forms of his food, now in addition his magical endeavor would be turned to averting the just wrath of the spirits who animated these forms--just indeed, for the rudest savage would perceive the wrong done and the probability of its retribution. Clearly the wrong done could only be expiated by an equivalent sacrifice of some kind on the part of the man, or the tribe--that is by the offering to the totem-animal or to the corn-spirit of some victim whom these nature powers in their turn could feed upon and assimilate. In