Mere domestic ancestor-worship, once more, could scarcely give us the origin of anything more than domestic religion--the cult of the manes, the household gods, as distinct from that of the tribal and national deities. But kingship supplies us with the missing link. We have seen in Mr. Duff Macdonald’s account of the Central African god-making how the worship of the chief’s ancestors gives rise to tribal or village gods; and it is clear how, as chieftainship and kingship widen, national gods of far higher types may gradually evolve from these early monarchs. Especially must we take the time-element into account, remembering that the earlier ancestors get at last to be individually forgotten as men, and remain in memory only as supernatural beings. Thus kingship rapidly reacts upon godship. If the living king himself is great, how much greater must be the ancestor whom even the king himself fears and worships; and how infinitely greater still that yet earlier god, the ancestor’s ancestor, whom the ancestor himself revered and propitiated! In some such way there grows up gradually a hierarchy of gods, among whom the oldest, and therefore the least known, are usually in the end the greatest of any. The consolidation of kingdoms and empires, and the advance of the arts, tell strongly with concurrent force in these directions; while the invention of written language sets {074}a final seal on the godhead and might of great early ancestors. Among very primitive tribes, indeed, we find as a rule only very domestic and recent objects of worship. The chief prays for the most part to his own father and his immediate predecessors. The more ancient ancestors, as Mr. Duff Macdonald has so well pointed out, grow rapidly into oblivion. But with more advanced races, various agencies arise which help to keep in mind the early dead; and in very evolved communities these agencies, reaching a high pitch of evolution, make the recent gods or kings or ghosts seem comparatively unimportant by the side of the very ancient and very long-worshipped ones. More than of any other thing, it may be said of a god, _vires acquirit eundo_. Thus, in advanced types of society, saints or gods of recent origin assume but secondary or minor importance; while the highest and greatest gods of all are those of the remotest antiquity, whose human history is lost from our view in the dim mist of ages. Three such agencies of prime importance in the transition from the mere ghost to the fully developed god must here be mentioned. They are the rise of temples, of idols, and, above all, of priesthoods. Each of these we must now consider briefly but separately.