Since morality is the last virtue acquired by man and the first one he is likely to lose, it is not so surprising to find outrages on morals among the undeveloped inhabitants of the north as it is to find them in intelligent Christian communities among people whose moral sense ought to be far above that of the average primitive man in view of their associations and the variations that have been so frequently repeated and accumulated by heredity; and where there is no hierarchy nor established missionaries it is still more surprising to find any moral sense at all among a people whose vague religious belief does not extend beyond Shamanism or Animism, which to them explains the more strange and striking natural phenomena by the hypothesis of direct spiritual agency.
It must not be understood by this, however, that these people have no religion, as many travellers have erroneously believed; that would be almost equivalent to stating that races of men exist without speech, memory or knowledge of fire. A purely ethnological view of religion which regards it as "the feeling which falls upon man in the presence of the unknown," favors the idea that the children of the icy north have many of the same feelings in this respect as those experienced by ourselves under similar conditions, although there is doubtless a change in us produced by more advanced thought and nicer feeling. On the other hand, how many habits and ideas that are senseless and perfectly unexplainable by the light of our present modes of life and thought can be explained by similar customs and prejudices existing among these distant tribes. Is there no fragment of primitive superstition or residue of bygone ages in the supposed influence of the "Evil Eye" in Ireland, or in the habit of "telling the bees" in Germany? Is there not something of intellectual fossildom in the popular notion about Friday and thirteen at table, and in the ancient rite of exorcising oppressed persons, houses and other places supposed to be haunted by unwelcome spirits, the form of which is still retained in the Roman ritual? And is not our enlightened America "the land of spiritualists, mesmerism, soothsaying and mystical congregations"?
