the savage without reading the curse written, I do not say only in his soul, but even in the exterior form of his body. He is an infant, robust, yet deformed and ferocious, in whom the flame of intelligence no longer throws more than a lurid and intermittent glare.... I cannot abandon this subject without suggesting an important observation: The barbarian who is intermediate between the civilised man and the savage, has been and may be again civilised by some sort of religion; but the savage, properly so called, has never been so except by Christianity. It is a prodigy of the first order, a species of redemption, exclusively reserved to the true priesthood.[236]... For the rest, we must not confound the _savage_ with the _barbarian_. [234] I need not remind my reader that these speculations of De Maistre anticipated by many years the analogous, though at the same time independent, conclusions of Archbishop Whately, in his lecture "On the Origin of Civilisation," published in 1854. [235] "We ought then to recognise that the state of civilisation and of science is, in a certain sense, the natural and primitive state of man. Thus, all oriental traditions commenced with a state of perfection and light, and, I repeat it, of supernatural light; and Greece--lying Greece, which 'has dared everything in history'--renders homage to this truth, in placing its Golden Age at the beginning of things. It is no less remarkable that it does not attribute to the following ages, even to the iron age, the state of savagery, so that all that it has told us of those primitive men living on acorns, &c., puts it _in contradiction with itself_, and can only have reference to particular cases, _i.e._ to some races degraded, and then reclaimed to a state of nature, which is a state of civilisation."--_De Maistre's "Soirées de St Petersbourg"_ i. _Deux: Entretien_, p. 98. [236] I consider that this remark has been fully substantiated in Marshall's "Christian Missions."