not'--whose ideas of marriage are so vague and slight that the idea,
'communal marriage' (in which all the women of the tribe are common
to all the men, and them only), has been invented to denote it. Now
if we consider how cohesive and how fortifying to human societies
are the love of truth, and the love of parents, and a stable
marriage tie, how sure such feelings would be to make a tribe which
possessed them wholly and soon victorious over tribes which were
destitute of them, we shall begin to comprehend how unlikely it is
that vast masses of tribes throughout the world should have lost all
these moral helps to conquest, not to speak of others. If any
reasoning is safe as to pre-historic man, the reasoning which
imputes to him a deficient sense of morals is safe, for all the
arguments suggested by all our late researches converge upon it, and
concur in teaching it.

Nor on this point does the case rest wholly on recent
investigations. Many years ago Mr. Jowett said that the classical
religions bore relics of the 'ages before morality.' And this is
only one of several cases in which that great thinker has proved by
a chance expression that he had exhausted impending controversies
years before they arrived, and had perceived more or less the
conclusion at which the disputants would arrive long before the
public issue was joined. There is no other explanation of such
religions than this. We have but to open Mr. Gladstone's 'Homer' in
order to see with how intense an antipathy a really moral age would
regard the gods and goddesses of Homer; how inconceivable it is that
a really moral age should first have invented and then bowed down
before them; how plain it is (when once explained) that they are
antiquities, like an English court-suit, or a STONE-sacrificial
knife, for no one would use such things as implements of ceremony,