Roger Williams translates "they go to hell," by Wame naumakiauog, which literally means "the place below." 20

The Catholic missionaries when writing Chippeway, use a similar term for hell, Anamakamig, which as an adverb, simply means "under ground."

In the Cree the word used is Matche manita wiki, the house of the bad spirit.

The word for hell in Eliot's Bible is Chepiohke, which is derived from chippen, he is dead, and ohke, land or place; hence "the place of the dead." With the locative termination, Eliot writes it Chepiohkomuk, at the place of the dead.

It is not necessary to carry these citations any farther. If so carried, they will undoubtedly be found to fall into the same general line as those already enumerated. Primitive man has no place, either in his thought or vocabulary for a place of endless woe. But the doctrine was brought forth, although not known prior to the third century of the Christian era. Once brought forth, it flourished in the imagination of debased minds. A truer, brighter day, where intelligence and purity of thought are given their proper place must overcome the debased, retarding doctrines, born in iniquity, cultivated in ignorance, and upheld in superstition. J. P. MacLean.

ARTICLE XXVIII.

The Rise and Decline of Idolatry.

In the history of the Church the ancient heathenism is ever rising from the depths of the natural man to do battle against the new life of Christianity. The conflict is not ended. The peace of the Church now is no perfect peace, but only makes a new phase in the struggle which is yet to be fought out. And we are to die in the midst of it; for stronger than ever the heathen spirit is wrestling against Christian thought and life; and it almost seems the question of the times should be gathered up in this question: Shall we remain Christian, or become Heathen again? Uhlhorn.

The notion that "Fetishism is the infancy of religion," first asserted by DeBrosses in 1760, by Meiners in 1806, and by 20" Key into the Language of America," p. 159.

Theodore Parker in 1842,—is now known to be untenable. 1 The sources of knowledge touching early religious beliefs and practices are to-day more ample and accessible than when De Brosses wrote his Du Culte des Dieux Fétiches, or even sixty years later, when Parker addressed to admiring audiences in a Boston theatre the substance of his "Discourse on Matters Pertaining to Religion." The "Dark Continent" of Comparative Religions was then a veritable terra incognita, and what it really contained could only be conjectured. "Guesses at Truth," and theories without facts to sustain them marks of a period of ignorance and speculation, were plentiful, but the bed-rock of absolute truth was not reached. The air was full of speculation. The stories of sailors, and of a few venturesome travellers, who had merely skirted the coasts of India and Africa, and who had studied inadequately what they saw, were received with unquestioning credulity, and treated as sober truth.

sure

On this side the Atlantic, certain young men of liberal culture gave hospitality to what was called "advanced thought," and the "higher criticism," in theology and sociology,— then current in France and Germany, -and they disseminated their ideas with a zeal characteristic of youth. The epigrammatic brilliancy and apparently sound learning of Parker; the philosophic serenity and sweetness of Emerson; the broad philanthropy of Brisbane, Dana, Ripley, and their congeners of Brook Farm, attracted a large following. The sermons of Parker, printed in pamphlet form, were scattered far and wide. A "Dial," that proposed to record on its sober face the pulsebeat of progress, was set up in Boston, and once a month delected the philosophic elect with the unsoundable depths of its wisdom, and mystified everybody with its "Orphic sayings." A "Harbinger" was sent out to proclaim that." a good time is coming boys," only "wait a little longer," - in fact that it had already come, and was only modestly waiting to be recognized. Crude statements, assumed facts, unripe theories, for a time ran riot; and it really seemed that nothing was left to do but

1" Disc, of Relig. p. 54."

to go back to chaos and begin anew. It was then that the fetish theory of DeBrosses took its place among the theories of "advanced" American thinkers, not only as a probable, but truthful, explanation of the origin and development of historic religion; and the so-called "radical school" has maintained it, with more or less positiveness, ever since.

But the cooling of an excitement, like the cooling of volcanic lava is inevitable. It was soon made manifest that imagination had had far more play in the construction of theories than facts warranted; and that the comparatively unknown past, and the almost equally unknown present, were made to yield what they did not contain. It is always possible to fill the dark with imaginary ghosts; for what is hidden away in the dark we do not absolutely know; aud then it is so amazingly roomy. The De Brosses theory, says Prof. Max Müller, "sounded so easy, so natural, so plausible, that it soon found its way into manuals and school-books, and I believe we have all been brought up on it. I, myself," he continues, "certainly held it for a long time, and never doubted it till I became more and more startled by the fact that, while in the earliest acsessible documents of religious thought we look in vain for any clear traces of fetishism, they become more and more frequent everywhere in the latter stages of religious development, and are certainly more visible in the later corruptions of the Indian religion, beginning with the Altrarvava, than in the earlier hymns of the Rig-Veda." 2

The trend of the best thinking and scholarship to-day is, undoubtedly, with Prof. Müller, and away from the theory of De Brosses; and the conviction seems to be growing among those who have given most attention to the subject, and who are best equipped to form an intelligent opinion, that idolatory, in all its phases, is not a primary, but a secondary formation; and that the human race, when it came to have a religion, set out with a pure monotheism. To this conviction the fetish theory will ultimately give way; although theories vociferously aseerted, and vigorously pushed, are apt to die hard; and the difficulty of extermination is liable to be complicated by the fact that 2 "Orig. and Growth of Relig.," p. 58.

there is always a restless and noisy crowd of people who, as James Russell Lowell wittily phrases it, are ready at a moment's notice "to be off with a rub-a-dub-dub for the last New Jerusalem."

But what is Fetishism? The word "fetish" is a foreign importation, quite unknown to our language. The word fetico is the name of a charm, amulet, or talisman, and was applied by the Portuguese to what they saw among the negroes of the Gold Coast. When they saw the negro prostrating himself before some crude, material object,—something which themselves called fetico, they concluded that this constituted the sum of the negro's religion, and they so reported. The deduction from this premise was easy, and it seemed logical; thus: 1. The negro is one of the lowest types of mankind. 2. The objects of his superstitious veneration are "the merest rubbish," -stones, bones, and such like. 3. Fetishism, therefore, is the earliest form of religion, — in other words, is "the infancy of religion." A word was wanted to characterize this new discovery, and naturally a word was chosen from the language of the discoverers, namely, fetish,—hence, fetishism. Coypists of De Brosses, Meiners, Parker, et. al. have not scrupled to apply these words with their false implication, to the lower forms of idolatory, indiscriminately; thus mixing up three distinct forms of religion; namely, - Physiolatry, or the worship paid to natural objects; such as rivers, trees, mountains, and such objects as inspire awe or gratitude, -Zoolatry, or the worship paid to animals; of which Egypt and India afford striking illustration,- Fetishism, or worship paid to "mere rubbish," without apparent reason,-" anything" as De Brosses explains, "which people like to select for adoration.” 3

It is not our purpose in this discussion to deny the doctrine of evolution, when applied with specific limitations, to morals and religion; but we propose to maintain that no form of idolatory, of which we have any knowledge, represents the starting point from which religious ideas and worship took their rise. Facts warrant the conclusion that God was first conceived of as a Spirit, and that the first form of worship was 8 "Origin and Growth of Religion." p. 61.

purely spiritual adoration of one God "In spirit and in truth." With Mr. Herbert Spencer, we hold that "the theory of progression, taken in its unqualified form, is untenable;” that there is "no adequate warrant for the notion that the lowest savagery has always been as low as it is now-that it is quite possible, yea more, highly probable, that retrogression has been as frequent as progression.'

"4

The attentive reader will not be slow to perceive that, if it be taken for granted that “retrogression has been as frequent as progression," the fetish theory cannot, with any certainty, be made to stand; and we certainly do know that facts all along the line of history warrant this conclusion. That idolatry is the result of retrogression, is indicated by the fact that every idolatrous pantheon has grown from simplicity to complexity, from gods few to gods many; and this by absolute law. Falsehood has an irreversible tendency to become complex, while truth, in essence and tendency, is simple. From out the mists of time, in the far-away distance, look across the intervening historical space, the great gods of eld,- Elohim, Brahm, Osiris, Ahura-Mazda, Jupiter, Odin, Tien, but as the ages go by these great gods are either dethroned, or associated with a multitude of other gods; and the heavens and the earth are filled with their imaginary presence and strife. They plot, rebel, and fight each other like furious, ravening beasts, until scarcely one of the earlier gods but is compelled to resign the sceptre and vacate the throne.

Three historical stages attend the development of idolatry, that not only mark its inevitable tendency, but its necessary results. The first stage is developed in a species of nature-worship. When we get down to bottom facts, it is found that those forms and forces of nature that inspire dread, and are invested with mystery, together with those that are genial and practically indispensable to life, are endowed with supernatural powers and propitiated with sacrifice and prayer. All religions, true or false, are made effective by being pivotal, more or less, on fear. Only in the highest form of religion, the Hebrew4" Sociology," p. 106,