found that, under this temptation, I was led on to form, in my own mind, a connected whole, designed to coincide with some ingenious theory which I might wish to be true. Generally speaking, it is necessary, I think, to view with suspicion any very regular account given by travellers of the religion of savages." (Yet we have seen the absence of "regularity," the differences of opinion among priests, objected to by Mr. Max Müller as a proof of the untrustworthy nature of our evidence.) "The real religious notions of savages cannot be separated from the vague and unformed, as well as bestial and grotesque mythology with which they are intermixed. The faint struggling efforts of our natures in so early or so little advanced a stage of moral and intellectual cultivation can produce only a medley of opinions and beliefs, not to be dignified by the epithet religious, which are held loosely by the people themselves, and are neither very easily discovered nor explained." When we came to civilised mythologies, we found that they also are "bestial and grotesque," "loosely held," and a "medley of opinions and beliefs."
Mr. Sproat was "two years among the Ahts, with his mind constantly directed to the subject of their religious beliefs," before he could discover that they had any such beliefs at all. Traders assured him that they had none. He found that the Ahts were "fond of mystification" and of "sells;" and, in short, this inquirer, living with the Ahts like an Aht, discounted every sort of circumstance which could invalidate his statement of their myths.[1] Now, when we find Mr. Codrington taking the same precautions in Melanesia, and when his account of Melanesian myths reads like a close copy of Mr. Sproat's account of Aht legends, and when both are corroborated by the collections of Bleek, and Hahn, and Gill, and Castren, and Rink, in far distant corners of the world, while the modern testimony of these scholarly men is in harmony with that of the old Jesuit
- ↑ Pp. 203–205.
