es be easy to make, for the data could not be found; and
a rash attempt to subdue the superstition by a striking instance may
easily end in confirming it. Francis Newman, in the remarkable
narrative of his experience as a missionary in Asia, gives a curious
example of this. As he was setting out on a distant and somewhat
hazardous expedition, his native servants tied round the neck of the
mule a small bag supposed to be of preventive and mystic virtue. As the
place was crowded and a whole townspeople looking on, Mr. Newman
thought that he would take an opportunity of disproving the
superstition. So he made a long speech of explanation in his best
Arabic, and cut off the bag, to the horror of all about him. But as
ill-fortune would have it, the mule had not got thirty yards up the
street before she put her foot into a hole and broke her leg; upon
which all the natives were confirmed in their former faith in the power
of the bag, and said, 'You see now what happens to unbelievers.'

Now the present point as to these superstitions is their military
inexpediency. A nation which was moved by these superstitions as to
luck would be at the mercy of a nation, in other respects equal, which,
was not subject to them. In historical times, as we know, the panic
terror at eclipses has been the ruin of the armies which have felt it;
or has made them delay to do something necessary, or rush to do
something destructive. The necessity of consulting the auspices, while
it was sincerely practised and before it became a trick for disguising
foresight, was in classical history very dangerous. And much worse is
it with savages, whose life is one of omens, who must always consult
their sorcerers, who may be turned this way or that by some chance
accident, who, if they were intellectually able to frame a consistent
military policy--and some savages in war see farther than in anything
else--are yet liable to be put out, distracted, confused, and turned
aside in the carrying out of it, because some event, really innocuous
but to their minds foreboding, arrests and frightens them. A religion
full of omens is a military misfortune, and will bring a nation to
destruction if set to fight with a nation at all equal otherwise, who
had a religion without omens. Clearly then, if all early men
unanimously, or even much the greater number of early men, had a
religion WITHOUT omens, no religion, or scarcely a religion, anywhere
in the world could have come