meaning was largely hidden from the observer; and there has been a
great deal of material collected in recent years which is without
value because it is modern and hybrid, inextricably mixed with
Biblical legend and Caucasian philosophy. Some of it has even been
invented for commercial purposes. Give a reservation Indian
a present, and he will possibly provide you with sacred songs, a
mythology, and folk-lore to order!

My little book does not pretend to be a scientific treatise.
It is as true as I can make it to my childhood teaching and
ancestral ideals, but from the human, not the ethnological
standpoint. I have not cared to pile up more dry bones, but to
clothe them with flesh and blood. So much as has been written by
strangers of our ancient faith and worship treats it chiefly as
matter of curiosity. I should like to emphasize its universal
quality, its personal appeal!

The first missionaries, good men imbued with the narrowness of
their age, branded us as pagans and devil-worshipers, and demanded
of us that we abjure our false gods before bowing the knee at their
sacred altar. They even told us that we were eternally lost,
unless we adopted a tangible symbol and professed a particular form
of their hydra-headed faith.

We of the twentieth century know better! We know that all
religious aspiration, all sincere worship, can have but one source
and one goal. We know that the God of the lettered and the
unlettered, of the Greek and the barbarian, is after all the same
God; and, like Peter, we perceive that He is no respecter
of persons, but that in every nation he that feareth Him and