In all missionary accounts of savage religion, we have to guard against two kinds of bias. One is the bias which makes the observer deny any religion to the native race, except devil-worship. The other is the bias which lends him to look for traces of a pure primitive religious tradition. Yet we cannot but observe this reciprocal phenomenon: missionaries often find a native name and idea which answer so nearly to their conception of God that they adopt the idea and the name, in teaching. Again, on the other side, the savages, when first they hear the missionaries' account of God, recognise it, as do the Hurons and Bakwain, for what has always been familiar to them. This is recorded in very early pre-missionary travels, as in the book of William Strachey on Virginia (1612), to which we now turn. The God found by Strachey in Virginia cannot, by any latitude of conjecture, be regarded as the result of contact with Europeans. Yet he almost exactly answers to the African Nyankupon, who is explained away as a 'loan-god.' For the belief in relatively pure creative beings, whether they are morally adored, without sacrifice, or merely neglected, is so widely diffused, that Anthropology must ignore them, or account for them as 'loan-gods'--or give up her theory! [Footnote 1: Lejean, _Rev. des Deux Mondes_, April 1862, p. 760. Citing for the chant, Beltrame, _Dictionario della lingua denka_, MS.] [Footnote 2: Waitz, ii. 74.] [Footnote 3: 1882.] [Footnote 4: _Ecclesiastical Institutions_, 681.] [Footnote 5: _Africana_, i. 66.] [Footnote 6: _Africana_, i. 67.] [Footnote 7: _Africana_, i. 71, 72_] [Footnote 8: i 88.] [Footnote 9: i. 68.] [Footnote 10: i. 130.] [Footnote 11: Ibid.] [Footnote 12: _Africana_, i 279-301.] [Footnote 13: Edinburgh, 1892.] [Footnote 14: Incidentally Mr. Macdonald shows that, contrary to Mr. Spencer's opinion, these savages have words for dreams and dreaming. They interpret dreams by a system of symbols, 'a canoe is ill luck,' and 'dreams go by contraries.'] [Footnote 15: Waitz, _Anthropologie_, ii. 167.] [Footnote 16: Waitz and Gerland, _Anthropologie_, vi. 796-799 and 809. In 1874 Mr. Howitt's evidence on the moral element in the mysteries was not published. Waitz scouts the idea that the higher Australian beliefs are of European origin. 'Wir schen vielmehr uralte Trümmer ähnlicher Mythologenie in ihnen,' (vi. 798) flotsam from ideas of immemorial antiquity.] [Footnote 17: Wilson, p. 209.] [Footnote 18: Wilson, p. 392.] [Footnote 19: Park's _Journey_, i. 274, 275, 1815.] [Footnote 20: P. 245.] [Footnote 21: London, 1887.] [Footnote 22: Ellis, pp. 20, 21.] [Footnote 23: P. 4.] [Footnote 24: Ellis, p. 10.] [Footnote 25: P. 120.] [Footnote 26: P. 15.] [Footnote 27: P. 125.] [Footnote 28: Ellis, pp. 24, 25.] [Footnote 29: Ellis, p. 189.] [Footnote 30: Miss Kingsley, p. 442.] [Footnote 31: Ellis, p. 229.] [Footnote 32: Ibid. p. 25.] [Footnote 33: Op. cit. p. 27.] [Footnote 34: Ellis, p. 29.]