There is still one other case of apparent exception to the rule. Some persons have been found, who in early childhood were separated from human society and grew up towards the years of maturity in an isolated state, having no contact with their fellow-mortals. These give no signs of any religious element in their nature. But other universal faculties of the race, the tendency to laugh, and to speak articulate words, give quite as little sign of their existence.[1] Yet when these unfortunate persons are exposed to the ordinary influence of life, the religious, like other faculties, does its work. Hence we may conclude it existed, though dormant until the proper conditions of its development were supplied.
These three apparent exceptions serve only to confirm the rule that the religious sentiment, like the power of attention, thought, and love, is universal in the race. Yet it is plain that there was a period in which the primitive wild man, without language or self-consciousness, gave no sign of any religious faculty at all, still the original element lay in this baby-man.
However, like other faculties, this is possessed in different degrees by different races, nations, and individuals, and at particular epochs of the world's or the individual's history acquires a predominance it has not at other times. It seems God never creates two races, nations, or men, with precisely the same endowments. There is a difference, more or less striking, between the intellectual, æsthetic, and moral development of two races, or nations, or even between two men of the same race and nation. This difference seems to be the effect, not merely of the
- ↑ See a collection of the most remarkable of these cases in Jahn's Appendix Hermeneuticæ, &c., Viennæ, 1815, Vol. II. p. 208, et seq., and the authors there cited. Monboddo, Ancient Metaphysics, &c., Edinburgh, 1779, et seq., Vol. III. book ii. chap. 1, and Appendix, chap. 3. Col. Sleeman's account of “Wolves nurturing Children in their Dens,” Plymouth, England, 1852. Windsor's Papuans, Lond. 1853. Capt. Gibson's communication to the American Geog. Soc., Dec. 1853.
religious observances. See in Pritchard, l. c. Vol. I. p. 188, the statements relative to the Esquimaux, and his correction of the erroneous and ill-natured accounts of others. If any nation is destitute of religious opinions and observances, it must be the Esquimaux, and the Bushmans of South Africa, who seem to be the lowest of the human race. But it is clear, from the statement of travellers and missionaries, that both have religious sentiments and opinions. The Heathen philosophers admitted it as a fact universally acknowledged that there was a God.
