D. This agreement among individuals and nations so widely separated in time and place can be most satisfactorily explained by supposing that it has its ground, not in accidental circumstances, but in the nature of man as man. The diverse and imperfectly developed ideas of the supreme Being which prevail among men are best accounted for as misinterpretations and perversions of an intuitive conviction common to all. Huxley, Lay Sermons, 163—“There are savages without God, in any proper sense of the word; but there are none without ghosts.” Martineau, Study, 2:353, well replies: “Instead of turning other people into ghosts, and then appropriating one to ourselves [and attributing another to God, we may add] by way of imitation, we start from the sense of personal continuity, and then predicate the same of others, under the figures which keep most clear of the physical and perishable.” Grant Allen describes the higher religions as “a grotesque fungoid growth,” that has gathered about a primitive thread of ancestor-worship. But this is to derive the greater from the less. Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, 358—“I can find no trace of ancestor-worship in the earliest literature of Babylonia which has survived to us”—this seems fatal to Huxley’s and Allen’s view that the idea of God is derived from man’s prior belief in spirits of the dead. C. M. Tyler, in Am. Jour. Theo., Jan. 1899:144—“It seems impossible to deify a dead man, unless there is embryonic in primitive consciousness a prior concept of Deity.” Renouf, Religion of Ancient Egypt, 93—“The whole mythology of Egypt ... turns on the histories of Ra and Osiris.... Texts are discovered which identify Osiris and Ra.... Other texts are known wherein Ra, Osiris, Amon, and all other gods disappear, except as simple _names_, and the unity of God is asserted in the noblest language of monotheistic religion.” These facts are earlier than any known ancestor-worship. “They point to an original idea of divinity above humanity” (see Hill, Genetic Philosophy, 317). We must add the idea of the superhuman, before we can turn any animism or ancestor-worship into a religion. This superhuman element was suggested to early man by all he saw of nature about him, especially by the sight of the heavens above, and by what he knew of causality within. For the evidence of a universal recognition of a superior power, see Flint, Anti-theistic Theories, 250-289, 522-533; Renouf, Hibbert Lectures for 1879:100; Bib. Sac., Jan. 1884:132-157; Peschel, Races of Men, 261; Ulrici, Leib und Seele, 688, and Gott und die Natur, 658-670, 758; Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1:377, 381, 418; Alexander, Evidences of Christianity, 22; Calderwood, Philosophy of the Infinite, 512; Liddon, Elements of Religion, 50; Methodist Quar. Rev., Jan. 1875:1; J. F. Clark, Ten Great Religions, 2:17-21.