ies they captured in battle.
They fattened, slayed, and devoured their slaves also, unless they
thought they could get a good price for them; and moreover, for
weariness of life or desire for glory (for they thought it a great thing
and a sign of a generous soul to despise life), or for love of their
rulers, offered themselves up for food. There were, indeed, many
cannibals, as in the East Indies and Brazil and elsewhere, but none such
as these, since the others only ate their enemies, but these their own
blood relations.

There is therefore, combining the fact mentioned by Wagner with the fact
that some nations have no idea of one or more gods, not even a word to
express it (proving that they have no idea), I say, there is therefore
no evidence that man was aboriginally endowed with any such belief as
the existence of an Omnipotent God; and in this assertion almost all the
learned men concur. "If, however," says Darwin, "we include under the
term religion, the belief in unseen or spiritual agencies, the case is
wholly different; for this belief seems to be universal with the less
civilized races. Nor is it difficult to understand how it arose."

The savage has a stronger belief in bad spirits than in good ones. "The
same high mental faculties which first led man to believe in unseen
spiritual agencies, then in fetishism, polytheism, and ultimately in
monotheism, would infallibly lead him, as long as his reasoning powers
remained poorly developed, to very strange superstitions and customs.
Many of these are terrible to think of: such as the sacrifice of human
beings to a blood-loving god, the trial of innocent persons by the
ordeal of poison, of fire, of witchcraft, etc.; yet it is well
occasionally to reflect on these superstitions, for they show us what an
infinite debt of gratitude we owe to the improvement of our reason, to
science, and to our accumulated knowledge."[65] As Sir J. Lubbock has
well observed: "It is not too much to say that the possible dread of
unknown evil hangs like a thick cloud over savage life, and embitters
every pleasure. These miserable and indirect consequences of our highest
faculties may be compared with the incidental and occasional mistakes of
the instincts of the lower animals."

The belief, then, of the existence of an Omnipotent God came with the
development of the mental faculties; and although there does exist such
a belief in the minds of men whose conscience is in a normal condi