It remains to
examine the subjective power of the native religions, their influence on
those who held them, and the place they deserve in the history of the
race. What are their merits, if merits they have? what their demerits?
Did they purify the life and enlighten the mind, or the contrary? Are
they in short of evil or of good? The problem is complex--its solution
most difficult. The author who of late years has studied most profoundly
the savage races of the globe, expresses the discouraging conviction:
"Their religions have not acted as levers to raise them to
civilization; they have rather worked, and that powerfully, to impede
every step in advance, in the first place by ascribing everything
unintelligible in nature to spiritual agency, and then by making the
fate of man dependent on mysterious and capricious forces, not on his
own skill and foresight."[288-1]
It would ill accord with the theory of mythology which I have all along
maintained if this verdict were final. But in fact these false doctrines
brought with them their own antidotes, at least to some extent, and
while we give full weight to their evil, let us also acknowledge their
good.
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