Demonology and Devil-lore

This book carry us back to the period when existing creeds were embryonic, and when primitive man was creating his religion from his environment. The lights of heaven, animal and vegetable life, the elements and natural phenomena supplied the raw material of mythology, and received embodiment as anthropomorphic deities. Mr. Conway premises the inexactness of speaking of the worship of stock and stone, of insect and reptile as primitive. He expresses his belief that these only acquired intrinsic sanctity when the origin of their imputed sacredness was lost—the progress of ideas being from the far to the near, and not from the near to the far. Macaulay has attributed a monotheistic faith to the first inhabitants of Greece.

Chalmers has done as much for China, and Mr. Brown, in his great Dionisiak Myth, has stated his conviction that “there is no gradual evolution in human thought, and that the earliest stages of religion and worship were infinitely superior to those which succeeded them.”

But whilst he endorses these opinions, Mr. Conway must remember that they are not shared by other competent authorities. Dr. Goldziher, for instance, stoutly maintains that religion was painfully evolved from mythology, and that polytheism has been the invariable precursor of faith in a single God. In this conflict of opinion we are as unprepared to decide whether worship rose from the idol to the Deity, or sank from the pure religion of a golden age into the vagaries of a degraded mythology, as we are to determine whether an adoration of the generative powers preceded or grew out of that of the sun. In the present state of our knowledge we must be content to suspend our judgment; but in examining Mr. Conway's work we must remember that it rests upon a theory which at least is not proven.

Moncure Daniel Conway (March 17, 1832 – November 15, 1907) was an American abolitionist minister. At various times Methodist, Unitarian, and a Freethinker, the radical writer descended from patriotic and patrician families of Virginia and Maryland but spent most of the final four decades of his life abroad in England and France, where he wrote biographies of Edmund Randolph, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Thomas Paine and his own autobiography. He led freethinkers in London's South Place Chapel, now Conway Hall.