g--who, as it has been
roughly said, had 'no pots and no pans'--who could indeed make a fire,
but who could hardly do anything else--who could hardly command nature
any further. Exactly also like a shrewd far-sightedness, a sound
morality on elementary transactions is far too useful a gift to the
human race ever to have been thoroughly lost when they had once
attained it. But innumerable savages have lost all but completely many
of the moral rules most conducive to tribal welfare. There are many
savages who can hardly be said to care for human life--who have
scarcely the family feelings--who are eager to kill all old people
(their own parents included) as soon as they get old and become a
burden--who have scarcely the sense of truth--who, probably from a
constant tradition of terror, wish to conceal everything, and would (as
observers say) 'rather lie than not'--whose ideas of marriage are so
vague and slight that the idea, 'communal marriage' (in which all the
women of the tribe are common to all the men, and them only), has been
invented to denote it. Now if we consider how cohesive and how
fortifying to human societies are the love of truth, and the love of
parents, and a stable marriage tie, how sure such feelings would be to
make a tribe which possessed them wholly and soon victorious over
tribes which were destitute of them, we shall begin to comprehend how
unlikely it is that vast masses of tribes throughout the world should
have lost all these moral helps to conquest, not to speak of others. If
any reasoning is safe as to pre-historic man, the reasoning which
imputes to him a deficient sense of morals is safe, for all the
arguments suggested by all our late researches converge upon it, and
concur in teaching it.

Nor on this point does the case rest wholly on recent investigations.
Many years ago Mr. Jowett said that the classical religions bore relics
of the 'ages before morality.' And this is only one of several cases in
which that great thinker has proved by a chance expression that he had
exhausted impending controversies years before they arrived, and had
perceived more or less the conclusion at which the disputants would
arrive long before the public issue was joined. There is no other
explanation of such religions than this. We have but to open Mr.
Gladstone's 'Homer' in order to see with how intense an antipathy a
really moral age would regard the gods and goddesses of Homer; how
inconceivable it is tha