It is the invariable testimony of all careful observers of every class that as a rule the aborigines were healthy, vigorous, virile, and chaste, until they became demoralized by the whites.

With many of them certain ceremonies had a distinct flavor of sex worship: a rude phallicism which exists to the present day.

To the priests, as to most modern observers, these rites were offensive and obscene, but to the Indians they were only natural and simple prayers for the fruitfulness of their wives and of the other producing forces.
J.S.Hittell says of the Indians of California: "They had no religion, no conception of a deity, or of a future life, no idols, no form of worship, no priests, no philosophical conceptions, no historical traditions, no proverbs, no mode of recording thought before the coming of the missionaries among them." Seldom has there been so much absolute misstatement as in this quotation.

Jeremiah Curtin, a life-long student of the Indian, speaking of the same Indians, makes a remark which applies with force to these statements: "The Indian, _at every step_, stood face to face with divinity as he knew or understood it.

He could never escape from the presence of those powers who had made the first world....