ress the Eternal, Ahonawilona. But as the Zuni
religion has only been studied in recent years, the hymns would be
dismissed as "borrowed," though there is nothing Catholic or Christian
about them. We have preferred to select examples where borrowing from
Christianity is out of the question. The current anthropological theory
is thus confronted with American examples of ideas of the divine which
cannot have been borrowed, while, if the gods are said to have been
evolved out of ghosts, we reply that, in some cases, they receive no
sacrifice, sacrifice being usually a note of ghostly descent. Again,
similar gods, as we show, exist where ghosts of chiefs are not
worshipped, and as far as evidence goes never were worshipped, because
there is no evidence of the existence at any time of such chiefs. The
American highest gods may then be equally free from the taint of ghostly
descent.

(1) Parkman, The Jesuits in North America. p. lxxviii.

There is another more or less moral North American deity whose evolution
is rather questionable. Pere Brebeuf (1636), speaking of the
Hurons, says that "they have recourse to Heaven in almost all their
necessities,... and I may say that it is, in fact, God whom they blindly
adore, for they imagine that there is an Oki, that is, a demon, in
heaven, who regulates the seasons, bridles the winds and the waves of
the sea, and helps them in every need. They dread his wrath, and appeal
to him as witness to the inviolability of their faith, when they make
a promise or treaty of peace with enemies. 'Heaven hear us to-day' is
their form of adjuration."(1)

(1) Relations, 1636, pp. 106, 107.

A spiritual being, whose home is heaven, who rides on the winds, whose
wrath is dreaded, who sanctions the oath, is only called "a demon" by
the prejudice of the worthy father who, at the same time, admits that
the savages have a conception of God--and that God, so conceived, is
this demon!

The debatable question is, was the "demon," or the actual expanse of
sky, first in evolution? That cannot precisely be settled, but in the
analogous Chinese case of China we find heaven (Tien) and "Shang-ti, the
personal ruling Deity," corresponding to the Huron "demon". Shang-ti,
the personal deity, occurs most in the oldest, pre-Confucian sacred
documents, and, so far, appears to be the earlier conception. The
"demon" in Huron faith may also be earlier than the religious regard
paid to his home, the sky.(1) The