First of all, as Mr. Lang points out, it takes for granted that the savage can have no idea of the Creator until he conceive Him as a spirit. "God is a spirit," has been dinned into our ears from childhood; and hence we conclude that he who has no notion of a spirit can have no notion of God; and that the idea of God is of later growth than that of a ghost. In truth, he who ascribes to God a body does not know _all_ about Him; but which of us knows _all_ about God? The point is, not whether the savage can know the metaphysics of divinity, but whether he can conceive a primal eternal moral being, author of all things, man's father and judge--a conception which abstracts entirely from the question of matter and spirit. We ourselves, like the savage, necessarily speak of God and imagine Him humanwise,--although our instructed reason, at times, corrects the error of our fancy,--and perhaps only "at times,"--only when we leave the ground of spontaneous thought, to walk on metaphysical stilts--nor while that childish image remains uncorrected and we neither affirm nor deny to Him a body, can our notion be called false, however obscure it be and inadequate. If the savage has no notion of spirit, yet he may have, and often seems to have a very true, though of course infinitely imperfect, notion of God; nay, perhaps a truer notion than those who affirm, without any sense of using analogy, that God is a spirit. For if His spirituality is insisted on, it is rather to exclude from Him the grossness and limitation of matter, and to ascribe to Him a transcendental degree of whatever perfection our notion of spirit may involve, than to classify Him, or to predicate of Him that finite nature which we call a spirit. God is neither a spirit nor a body; but rather like Ndengei of the Fijians: "an impersonation of the abstract idea of eternal existence;" one who is to be "regarded as a deathless _Being_, no question of 'spirit' being raised;" so that the first intuition of the unsophisticated mind is found to be in more substantial agreement with the last results of reflex philosophical thought, than those early philosophizings which halt between the affirmation and denial of bodily attributes, unable to prescind from the difficulty and unable to solve it. The history of the Jews, nay, the history of our own mind proves to demonstration that the thought of God is a far easier thought and a far earlier, than that of a spirit. Our mind, oar heart, our conscience, affirm the former instinctively, while the latter does continual violence to our imagination, except so far as spirit is misconceived to be an attenuated phantasmal body. Not only, therefore, does the savage imagine God and speak of Him humanwise, as we all do; but if he does not actually believe Him to be material, he at least will be slow in mastering the thought of His spirituality.