red and half forgot".

The hypothesis of borrowing admits of only one answer, but that answer
should be conclusive. If we can discover, say in North America, a single
instance in which the supreme being occurs, while yet he cannot possibly
be accounted for by any traceable or verifiable foreign influence, then
the burden of proof, in other cases, falls on the opponent. When he
urges that other North American supreme beings were borrowed, we can
reply that our crucial example shows that this need not be the fact. To
prove that it is the fact, in his instances, is then his business. It is
obvious that for information on this subject we must go to the reports
of the earliest travellers who knew the Red Indians well. We must try to
get at gods behind any known missionary efforts. Mr. Tylor offers us the
testimony of Heriot, about 1586, that the natives of Virginia believed
in many gods, also in one chief god, "who first made other principal
gods, and then the sun, moon and stars as petty gods".(1) Whence could
the natives of Virginia have borrowed this notion of a Creator before
1586? If it is replied, in the usual way, that they developed him
upwards out of sun, moon and star gods, other principal gods, and
finally reached the idea of the Creator, we answer that the idea of the
Maker is found where these alleged intermediate stages are NOT found, as
in Australia. In Virginia then, as in Victoria, a Creator may have been
evolved in some other way than that of gradual ascent from ghosts,
and may have been, as in Australia and elsewhere, prior to verifiable
ghost-worship. Again, in Virginia at our first settlement, the native
priests strenuously resisted the introduction of Christianity. They
were content with their deity, Ahone, "the great God who governs all
the world, and makes the sun to shine, creating the moon and stars his
companions.... The good and peaceable God... needs not to be sacrificed
unto, for he intendeth all good unto them." This good Creator, without
sacrifice, among a settled agricultural barbaric race sacrificing to
other gods and ghosts, manifestly cannot be borrowed from the newly
arrived religion of Christianity, which his priests, according to
the observer, vigorously resisted. Ahone had a subordinate deity,
magisterial in functions, "looking into all men's actions" and punishing
the same, when evil. To THIS god sacrifices WERE made, and if his name,
Okeus, is derived from Oki = "spirit," he was, of c