[3] Wilhelm Schmidt, born in Hörde, Germany in 1868, entered the Society of the Divine Word in 1890 and was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in 1892.

Schmidt theorized that human beings believed in a God who was the First Cause of all things and Ruler of Heaven and Earth before men and women began to worship a number of gods: In 1906, Schmidt founded the journal Anthropos, and in 1931, the Anthropos Institute, both of which still exist today.

His works available in English translation are: The Origin and Growth of Religion: Facts and Theories (1931), High Gods in North America (1933), The Culture Historical Method of Ethnology (1939), and Primitive Revelation (1939).

On Primitive Revelation, Eric J. Sharpe has said: "Schmidt did believe the emergent data of historical ethnology to be fundamentally in accord with biblical revelation—a point which he made in Die Uroffenbarung als Anfang der Offenbarung Gottes (1913) .

A revised and augmented version of this apologetical monograph was published in an English translation as Primitive Revelation (Sharpe 1939).