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Updated: June 5, 2025
And all this, according to our clerical authority, is evidence for ancestor-worship! All this appears to be derived from some incoherent speculations of Stade. For example, that learned German cites the story of Micah as a proof that the different tribes or clans had different religions.
Nor can we hastily reject the Shinto thought that all the dead become gods, while we respect the convictions of those strong souls of to-day who proclaim the divinity of man. Shino ancestor-worship, no doubt, like all ancestor-worship, was developed out of funeral rites, according to that general law of religious evolution traced so fully by Herbert Spencer.
I think that the history of modern Japan suggests very clearly what any wise people, with a civilization based upon ancestor-worship, would have done.
Should we make a deliberate attempt to increase the number of those who may share the common fund of happiness, by striving for an increase in the number of births? This end has been consciously sought for divers reasons. The ancestor-worship of China has made the Chinaman eagerly desirous of leaving behind him those who would devote themselves to him after he has departed this life.
We have seen that the developments of ancestor-worship in Japan present remarkable analogies with the developments of ancestor-worship in ancient Europe, especially in regard to the public cult, with its obligatory rites of purification.
And the Fetishism, Ancestor-worship, Hero-worship, and Demonology of primitive savages, are all, I believe, different manners of expression of their belief in ghosts, and of the anthropomorphic interpretation of out-of-the-way events, which is its concomitant.
It is through the teachings of evolution that there will ultimately be developed in the West a moral recognition of duty to the past like that which ancestor-worship created in the Far East. For even to-day whoever has mastered the first principles of the new philosophy cannot look at the commonest product of man's handiwork without perceiving something of its evolutional history.
Macdonald says about a Being among the Yaos, analogous to the Dendid of the Dinkas, or the Darumulun of Australia, or the Huron Ahone. Yet analysis detects, in Mr. Macdonald's report, copious traces of such a Being, though Mr. Macdonald himself believes in ancestor-worship as the Source of the local religion.
Until quite recently this portrait's features had been well-nigh extinguished under the accumulated soot and tarnish of many decades, but Eben had revered them with that veneration of ancestor-worship which is an egoism overflowing the boundaries of a single generation.
The peculiar character of the early human sacrifices at graves, the character of the funeral-rites, the abandonment of the house in which death had occurred. all prove that the early ancestor-worship was of a decidedly primitive kind.
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