onscious inferiority, submitted to the force of this argument.

If by religion is meant a public or private form of worship of any kind,
and if prayers, processions, meetings, offerings, images, or priests are
any of them necessary to constitute it, I can pronounce that the Rejangs
are totally without religion and cannot with propriety be even termed
pagans, if that, as I apprehend, conveys the idea of mistaken worship.
They neither worship God, devil, nor idols. They are not however without
superstitious beliefs of many kinds, and have certainly a confused
notion, though perhaps derived from their intercourse with other people,
of some species of superior beings who have the power of rendering
themselves visible or invisible at pleasure. These they call orang alus,
fine, or impalpable beings, and regard them as possessing the faculty of
doing them good or evil, deprecating their wrath as the sense of present
misfortunes or apprehension of future prevails in their minds. But when
they speak particularly of them they call them by the appellations of
maleikat and jin, which are the angels and evil spirits of the Arabians,
and the idea may probably have been borrowed at the same time with the
names. These are the powers they also refer to in an oath. I have heard a
dupati say, "My grandfather took an oath that he would not demand the
jujur of that woman, and imprecated a curse on any of his descendants
that should do it: I never have, nor could I without salah kapada
maleikat--an offence against the angels." Thus they say also, de talong
nabi, maleikat, the prophet and angels assisting. This is pure
Mahometanism.

NO NAME FOR THE DEITY.

The clearest proof that they never entertained an idea of Theism or the
belief of one supreme power is that they have no word in their language
to express the person of God, except the Allah tala of the Malays,
corrupted by them to Ulah tallo. Yet when questioned on the subject they
assert their ancestors' knowledge of a deity, though their thoughts were
never employed about him; but this evidently means no more than that
their forefathers as well as themselves had heard of the Allah of the
Mahometans (Allah orang islam).

IDEA OF INVISIBLE BEINGS.

They use, both in Rejang and Passummah, the word dewa to express a
superior invisible class of beings; but each country acknowledges it to
be of foreign derivation, and they suppose it Javanese. Radin, of Madura,
an island close to Java, w