On the other hand, the savage man would view the unknown object with wonder, perchance with dread; by-and-by he would venture to touch it, handle it, and would be amazed at its mysterious noise and at the movement of the hands on the dial-plate. If he dared open it, he would be still more astonished at its internal mechanism. So far, however, from attributing its construction to an intelligent being, he would rather be inclined to look upon the watch itself as animate,-as Attius's shepherd regarded the Argo, and the Mexicans the Spanish ships,and would reverence it, and most probably worship it as a divinity. After a while the watch would stop. But, instead of attributing this to the true cause, and of comprehending that it lay in his power to set the machine again in motion-to bring it back to life-by winding it up, the savage man would naturally conclude that this animate being had died. And whatever might be the immediate effect of this opinion upon his mind, the result would be that he would examine this now inanimate and no longer dreaded object more closely, like a child would pull it to pieces, and in the end destroy it, or else, not improbably, make of its remains a fetish or object of adoration.

A native of

On reaching himself in a

That this is not merely a speculative opinion is established by a curious occurrence recorded in one of the public journals some time after the foregoing remarks were written. Calcutta 'stole a musical box, ignorant of its use. the enclosure of Wellesley Square he concealed bush, and began to pick the lock. But the "lock" he picked was the key-hole of the musical spring, and lo! sweet sounds from the interior! He jumped up and flung it into the bush. Meanwhile, the native keeper of the garden came round, heard music from the bush, and trembled all over at the astounding phenomenon. He ran for an inspector, who finally arrested the box as it was rattling off the last bars of the last air—a rollicking comic song'*.

To enable the discoverer of the watch to speculate as to its origin, it is first necessary for him to be, if not actually a 'phi* Daily Telegraph,' April 25, 1871.

losopher,' at least an intelligent person, gifted with such reasoning powers, and possessed of such an amount of knowledge, as may qualify and enable him to judge rightly of the object thus falling in his way, so as not to be led to any conclusion other than the correct one by his ignorance and by the power of his imagination, which appears to be the less amenable to control the less the reasoning faculties are developed.

Not only to curb the imagination of the child and the savage man, but also to afford to them both such an amount of knowledge as would enable them to judge rightly respecting the watch, and, in fact, respecting every thing that requires the exercise of reason, it is essential that this faculty should have been sufficiently developed, which it could not be, either in the one or in the other, were they left to themselves. The child would

grow up little, if any thing, better than a savage, as we unhappily see exemplified in our 'street Arabs;' whilst the savage would end his days in the same state of brutality and ignorance in which he had begun them. So it must always be, and so it has always been, as we find demonstrated, if, laying aside all assumptions and speculations, we look to the evidence of recorded facts.

The entire written history that we possess of the various nations of the earth, though oftentimes imperfect, and not unfrequently merely legendary or even fabulous, proves that where such nations were not known to have been instructed and civilized by some invading and conquering race, they looked up to some great leader or teacher, some legislator and reformer, mostly an immigrant from some other country or a native traveller in foreign lands, from whom they derived their culture, their religious faith, their position in the list of nations. In every case where the revival of learning may not be traced to such sources, the impulse has still been given from without. There is not a single authenticated instance of any nation or race having raised itself by its own unaided efforts.

Even in the case of self-taught' individuals, they cannot be regarded as exceptions to the rule. If they have not com

menced their improvement under the immediate instruction of some master, they have lived among civilized beings, and have gained access to books, or had before their eyes some models, which they have studied or imitated, till they have acquired the power to manifest the inborn genius enabling them soon to surpass not only their contemporaries but also their teachers or their models. 'Poeta nascitur, non fit,' though a trite, is scarcely a truthful saying, unless it is qualified. The author of "Contarini Fleming' shows its true meaning when he portrays the melancholy and brooding childhood, the first indications of the predisposition, the growing consciousness of power, the reveries, the loneliness, the doubts, the moody misery, the ignorance of art, the failures, the despair' of the 'born' poet; and then says, by the mouth of the philosopher Winter, Remember this, that the painter and the poet, however assisted by their own organization, must alike perfect their style by the same process, I mean by studying the works themselves of great painters and great poets. . . Both must alike study before they execute. Both must alike consult Nature and invent the beautiful.'

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Nevertheless, the opinion most prevalent at the present day is that civilized man has, of his own natural powers, been able to raise himself from the state of the savage, that the savage has in like manner developed himself from the brute, that this latter has in its turn raised itself from some lower organization, and so on ad infinitum: which is virtually saying that man is his own creator. To show in detail the fallacy of this opinion would not be difficult; only it would occupy too much time, and would besides be beyond the scope of the present work. But one instance may be noticed, on account of its direct bearing on the subject treated of in the following pages.

It has been asserted that the present religious movement among the natives of India, of which Baboo Kesheb Chunder Sen is at the head, is not to be regarded as a restoration of 'original religion,'-whatever may be intended by that term other than the belief entertained in common by Jews, Christians, and

Mohammedans in the One Supreme Being, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,-and that neither did it emanate from the ancient religion of the country or from Christianity; but that it has commenced afresh from out of the innate resources of the human heart and soul. Yet nothing can be more incorrect than such a representation. Had it not been for the conquest of India by the English, and especially had not Ram Mohun Roy and other intelligent Hindoos held converse with and been educated among professors of Christianity, and acquired from them a knowledge of the substantial truth of their religious belief and of the absurdities of their own idolatrous superstitions, the Brahmo-Somaj would not have come into existence; for it could never have spontaneously emanated from the native resources of the human hearts and souls of the ignorant worshippers of Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva. The Hindoo reformer may flatter himself that he is original; but he demonstrated the contrary, when, in his reply to the representations of certain Christian ministers that he should adopt their confession of faith, he said :— 'I honour Christ as my Father's beloved Son, and I honour all other prophets and martyrs; but I love my God above all. There is no name so sweet, so dear, as that of Father.'

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Were it really true that ideas like these derived themselves from the innate resources of the human heart and soul, we must imagine the process by which Man arrived at this state of high religious development to have been something of the following kind. As soon as the light of reason dawned on the mind of the first being worthy to be called man,' he would have worshipped a rude fetish, the work of his own hands; then, from the innate resources of his own heart and soul becoming gradually enlightened, he would have rendered himself capable of conceiving an anthropomorphous god, who, however, to match his creator's' own still degraded condition, would at first have been a devil; and this devil would, as man himself improved, by degrees have become converted into an agathodaimon or beneficent divinity; till eventually, under the full light of human reason, the absurdity of external divinities, whether bad or good, becoming appa

rent, the Deity would be manifested in the mind of Man himself. And thus, as his primordial ancestor-not the

'Simia, quam similis, turpissima bestia, nobis,'

from which he glories in being descended, but his first human progenitor-grovelled before the rude fetish, the work of his own hands, so now Man, in the highest state of intellectual culture, adores the eidolon of his own mind, the image of himself.

It surely cannot be a sign of superiority that the intellect, because of its inability to raise itself to the comprehension of a spiritual Deity, loses itself in the mazes of metaphysics and materialism. It is not true wisdom, but the foolishness of a diseased or depraved imagination, that causes the mortal and sinful Ego-I by myself, I,-to be preferred to the Infinite and Eternal I AM. 'Know thyself' was the precept inscribed over the portico of the temple of Apollo at Delphi: the inscription on the true temple of the Almighty on earth-man's heart— should be Know thyself and God.'

With the conviction, then, that it is impossible for the creature, out of the depths of his moral consciousness, to form any true idea of his Maker, that it is not Man who can thus create God, the believer in Revelation reads in the most venerable record of antiquity—to call it by no higher title—that God created man, and made him in His own image, after His own likeness, and behold it was very good; and accepting the substantial truth of that record, he has no difficulty in understanding it to mean that the first man, instead of having existed in so debased a state as not to recognize his Maker, was created perfect after his kind, as nearly after the likeness of that Maker as the finite can resemble the Infinite,-that is to say, with a mind capable of knowing and appreciating his Creator and the works of creation.

By this it is not meant to affirm that Man was created with universal knowledge, or, indeed, that human knowledge of any specific kind was directly imparted to him by the Almighty,