Thus, {091}by convergence of all these streams, the primitive mummy or ghost or spirit passes gradually into a deity of unbounded glory and greatness and sanctity. The bodiless soul, released from necessary limits of space and time, envisaged as a god, is pictured as ever more and more superhuman, till all memory of its origin is entirely forgotten. But to the last, observe this curious point: all new gods or saints or divine persons are, each as they crop up first, of demonstrably human origin. Whenever we find a new god added from known sources to a familiar pantheon, we find without exception that he turns out to be--a human being. Whenever we go back to very primitive religions, we find all men’s gods are the corpses or ghosts of their ancestors. It is only when we take relatively advanced races with unknown early histories that we find them worshipping a certain number of gods who cannot be easily and immediately resolved into dead men or spirits. Unfortunately, students of religion have oftenest paid the closest attention to those historical religions which lie furthest away from the primitive type, and in which at their first appearance before us we come upon the complex idea of godhead already fully developed. Hence they are too much inclined, like Professor Robertson Smith, and even sometimes Mr. Frazer (whose name, however, I cannot mention in passing without the pro-foundest respect), to regard the idea of a godship as primordial, not derivative; and to neglect the obvious derivation of godhead as a whole from the cult and reverence of the deified ancestor. Yet the moment we get away from these advanced and too overlaid historical religions to the early conceptions of simple savages, we see at once that no gods exist for them save the ancestral corpses or ghosts; that religion means the performance of certain rites and offerings to these corpses or ghosts; and that higher elemental or departmental deities are wholly wanting. Even in the great historical religions themselves, the further back we go, and the lower down we {092}probe, the closer do we come to the foundation-stratum of ghosts or ancestor-gods. And where, as in Egypt, the evidence is oldest and most complete throughout, the more do we observe how the mystic nature-gods of the later priestly conceptions yield, as we go back age by age in time, to the simpler and more purely human ancestral gods of the earliest documents. It will be our task in the succeeding chapters of this work to do even more than this--to show that the apparently unresolvable element in later religions, including the Hebrew god Jahweh himself, can be similarly affiliated by no uncertain evidence upon the primitive conception of a ghost or ancestor. CHAPTER V.--SACRED STONES.