is greatly strengthened by a survey of the general course of religion. Wherever we can trace its course, we find that every people which has risen above the most rudimentary stages has become polytheistic. This statement holds true of peoples in all quarters of the globe, in all stages of culture, in all ages of time. Since, then, all the peoples whose development is matter of direct observation have been polytheists, and since in the vast majority of cases we can directly observe the facts, the presumption, when we come to a people whose annals do not record a period of polytheism, is that the annals are, for whatever reason, faulty-not that the people is an exception to general law. The essence of the argument from induction is that it is an inference from cases which we can observe to others which are beyond our power of direct observation. Now there is only one people in this exceptional case-the Jewish people.

But we are not confined to mere presumptions—whether drawn from the general process of evolution or from the course of religious development in particular-to show that monotheism was developed out of polytheism. We have more direct evidence, of two kinds. First, in polytheism we can see forces at work which in more than one recorded case have brought it to the verge of monotheism. Next, in the Jewish monotheism we can trace apparent survivals of a previous polytheism.

The first step towards monotheism is taken when one deity is, as not unusually happens, conceived to be supreme over all the others, and the rest are but his vassals, his ministers or angels. This is due to the transference of the relations which obtain in human society to the community of the gods: they, like men, are supposed to have a king over them. The next step is the result of the constant tendency of the ancients to identify one god with another : Herodotus had no difficulty in recognising the gods of Greece under the names which the Egyptians gave to their own deities; Cæsar and Tacitus did not hesitate to identify the gods of Gaul and Germany with those of Rome. And this was the more easy and reasonable, because in many cases the gods in question were really the deification of some one and the same natural phenomenon-sun, moon, etc. But

the most powerful impulse to the movement was given by metaphysical speculation: all real things are equally real, the reality of all is identical, there is only one reality-God. From this it followed that the various gods, believed by the vulgar to be different beings, were but different aspects or manifestation of one deity, in whom and in whose personality all met and were merged. As The Book of the Dead1 puts it: "Osiris came to Mendes; there he met the soul of Ra; they embraced and became as one soul in two souls." The various forms in which the one real existence manifests himself are his own creation, whether they be material, human, or divine. Thus he, according to an expression of the Egyptian theologians, perpetually "creates his own members, which are the gods," 2 or says, "I am the maker of heaven and of the earth. . . . It is I who have given to all the gods the soul which is within them. . . . I am Chepera in the morning, Ra at noon, Tmu in the evening.": But though maker of the earth, the one reality is "a spirit more spiritual than the gods; the holy soul which clothes itself with forms, but itself remains unknown." 4

The

But while, on the one hand, we thus see polytheism approaching monotheism, on the other, we find among the monotheistic Jews survivals from а time when they apparently, like other Semites, were polytheists. constant relapses of the mass of the people into idolatrous worship, as revealed by the denunciations in Scripture against such backsliding, seem to indicate a slow upward movement from polytheism, which was not yet complete, and so far as it was successful was due to the lifting power of a few great minds, striving to carry a reluctant people with them to the higher ground of monotheism. More conclusive, however, is the evidence afforded by the religious institutions of the Jews and by the ritual of Jehovah. Every god has some animal or other which and which alone it is proper to sacrifice to him. This close connection between a sacred animal and the god to whom it is sacred and is sacrificed points, as we have seen, to the ultimate identity of the god and the animal, and 2 D'Alviella, Hibbert Lecture, 214.

1 Ch. xvii., lines 42, 43.

3 Le Page Renouf, Hibbert Lecture, 221, 222.

4

* D'Alviella, loc. cit., quoting Maspero, Peuples de l'Orient, 279.

to an original totemism. From the nature of the sacrifice, therefore, e.g. whether animal or vegetable, we can infer something as to the origin of the god, whether he is descended from a plant or an animal totem. Further, if several kinds of animal are sacrificed, e.g. to Apollo, we can infer something as to the history of the god, namely, that under the one name, Apollo, several different gods have somehow come to be worshipped. When, then, we find that not only were animals sacrificed to Jehovah, but at the agricultural feast of Unleavened Bread a sheaf of corn played a prominent part, as in the agricultural rites at Eleusis; when we find that the Levitical law prescribed that oxen, sheep, goats, bread and wine should be offered at the sanctuary, the inference plainly seems to be that at the one altar a plurality of deities were worshipped, and the plural name "Elohim" used of the one God seems to add the evidence of language to that afforded by the comparative study of institutions.

Finally, the same causes which were at work elsewhere to evolve monotheism out of polytheism were in existence amongst the Jews. There was the same tendency to identify one god with another; and this tendency was considerably reinforced by the Semitic habit of applying general terms expressing lordship, e.g. Baal, to their gods; so that the difficulty would rather be to distinguish one Baal from another than to believe them the same god. Among the Jews, too, there would be the same tendency to project human relations on to things divine, to conceive the divine personality by what was known of the human, to imagine the community of the gods as reflecting the social relations of men. Hence the growth of the monarchy in the Jewish state would naturally be reflected by the development of the idea of one God, Lord and King of all. 'In Greece and Rome the kingship fell before the aristocracy; in Asia the kingship held its own, till in the larger states it developed into despotism, or in the smaller ones it was crushed by a foreign despotism. This diversity of political fortune is reflected in the diversity of religious development. . . . The tendency of the West, where the kingship succumbed, was towards a divine aristocracy of many gods, only modified by

a weak reminiscence of the old kingship in the not very effective sovereignty of Zeus; while in the East the national god tended to acquire a really monarchic sway. What is often described as the natural tendency of Semitic religion towards ethical monotheism, is in the main nothing more than а consequence of of the alliance of religion with monarchy."

1

Thus the hypothesis that monotheism was evolved out of polytheism has much to be said in its favour. There is the presumption afforded by the nature of evolution in general, and by the development of religion in particular; there is the improbability that the one doubtful case of the Jews should be an exception to a general law; there are the apparent survivals even in Jewish monotheism of a previous polytheism; there is the constant tendency of polytheisms to pass into monotheism, and the evidence for the existence of that tendency amongst the Jews themselves. But before we can accept the hypothesis, we must hear what, if anything, can be said against it.

We may, to begin with, admit that religion may advance from lower stages to higher; that Christianity is a higher form of religion than Judaism; that within the limits of the Old Testament itself a "progressive revelation" may be traced; and that, following the same line back, we may by the scientific use of the imagination conjecture in the unrecorded past a form of monotheism more rudimentary than any otherwise known to science. We may further admit the principle of evolution as applied to religion, but then we shall find that the argument from analogy tells rather against than for the hypothesis that monotheism is evolved from polytheism. If we are to treat religion as an organism and as subject to the same laws as govern the evolution of organisms, we must decline to take the two highest existing species and say that either is descended from the other; for that would be to repeat the vulgar error of imagining that men are supposed to be descended from apes. Indeed, if we base ourselves on evolutionary principles, we may safely say that, whatever be the genesis and history of monotheism, one thing is certain, namely, that it cannot have been developed 1 Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, 74.

out of polytheism. Both species may be descended from a common ancestor, but not one from the other. Further, the original form out of which the two later varieties were developed must have so developed by a series of intermediate forms. We should therefore expect, if we could trace monotheism back through these intermediate forms, to find some of them of such a kind that it would be difficult to say whether, strictly speaking, they were forms of monotheism or not, though they clearly were not forms of polytheism. Thus the essence of monotheism is that in it the worshipper worships only one god. What then shall we say of the worshipper who worships one god alone, but believes that the gods worshipped by other tribes exist, and are really gods, though his own attitude towards them is one of hostility? It is obvious that his is a lower form of faith than that of the man who worships only one god, and believes that, as for the gods of the heathen, they are but idols. Yet though his is not the highest form of monotheism, to call it polytheism would be an abuse of language. But if several tribes, each holding this rudimentary form of monotheism, coalesced into one political whole, and combined their gods into a pantheon, each tribe worshipping the others' gods as well as its own, we should have polytheism; while another tribe, of the same stock, might remain faithful to its god and develop the higher forms of monotheism. Thus polytheism and monotheism would both be evolved out of one and the same rudimentary form and common ancestor.

It may be said that to argue thus is to derive polytheism from monotheism, which is just as erroneous as to derive monotheism from polytheism, or to argue that apes are descended from men. It becomes necessary, therefore, to insist on the plain fact that religion is not an organism: religion is not an animal, or a plant, that it must obey identically the same laws of growth and evolution. It may

be that there are resemblances between religion as an organisation and an animal organism. It is certain that there are great differences. It may well be that the resemblances are sufficient to create an analogy between the two cases; but the differences make it inevitable that at some point or other the analogy should break down; and