amous circumnavigation of the globe, Captain Cook
says that the cannibals of New Zealand still acknowledged a superior
being, although their religion was a crude system of spiritualistic
practices.

Concerning the Koreans Mrs. L. H. Underwood, medical missionary, says
that a thousand unworthy deities now crowd the temples, although the
great universal Ruler is still worshipped at times, and the "ancient
purity of faith and worship has become sadly darkened."

The foremost student of modern missions, Johann Warneck, in _"The Living
Christ and Dying Heathenism"_ (F. H. Revell Co.,) comes to the
conclusion that the Christian religion and its monotheism are not only
not a development from lower origins, but that the heathen religions,
historically considered, are a degeneracy from a higher knowledge of
God. In other words, the application of the doctrine of evolution to the
field of comparative religion is a mistake. "Any form of Animism known
to me has no lines leading to perfection, but only incontestable marks
of degeneration," says the author. "In heathenism the gold of the divine
thought becomes dross."

Says he, "I have been counselled to recognize that the idea of evolution
at present ruling the scientific world must also rule in the
investigation of religion. I am not unacquainted with the literature of
the subject, I have described animistic heathenism as concretely as I
could; I confined myself strictly to that. I began with the facts of
experience; then I drew inferences from them. If these do not agree with
the dominant hypothesis of evolution, that is due to the brutal facts,
and not to the prepossessions of the observer.

"I do not deny that something can be said for the idea of evolution in
the religions of mankind, but the study of Animism, with which I have
long been familiar as an eyewitness, did not lead me to that idea.
Rather the conviction which I arrived at is, that animistic heathenism
is not a transition stage to a higher religion. There are no facts to
prove that animistic heathenism somewhere and somehow evolved upwards
towards a purer knowledge of God. I have worked as a missionary for
many years in contact with thousands of the adherents of animistic
heathenism and I have been convinced that the force of that heathenism
is hostile to God."

In the same work Dr. Warneck says that among the Battaks of Sumatra
there are "remains of a pure idea of God." but there is also a host of
spirits, bor