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 a consequence 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 mono

theism 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

what that point is, where the line is to be drawn, is a question which cannot be settled à priori or by a consideration merely of the laws of animal life, but only by careful study of the facts and history of religion itself. We can say with certainty that a seed, if it is to become a full-grown tree, must pass through certain intermediate stages; that a butterfly must once have been a chrysalis. But we cannot, on the strength of these analogies from organic life, say that religion to reach monotheism must pass through a stage of polytheism; or that, if it grows at all, it must in all cases, however different they may be, run through the same successive forms.

We can infer with certainty on seeing an oak that it sprang from an acorn, because of the innumerable instances known in which acorns do develop into oaks. In the same way, if there were many instances known of the way in which monotheism grows up, we might infer with tolerable confidence that one particular instance, the history of which did not happen to be recorded, obeyed the same laws of growth as all the others. Even if monotheism sprang up in two independent peoples, and its history was fully known in one case and very imperfectly known in the other, we should naturally and reasonably employ our knowledge of the one to fill up the gaps in our knowledge of the other. But, as a matter of fact, not even this is the case. On the contrary, the monotheism of the Jews is a unique and solitary phenomenon in the history of religion. Nowhere else in the world has the development of religion culminated in monotheism. The reasonable inference from this patent and fundamental fact is, that nowhere else can religion have developed along the same lines as amongst the Jews The very fact that all other nations have travelled along a line leading to polytheism, and that all have failed to get beyond it, constitutes a presumption that monotheism is not to be reached by the route that leads to polytheism. If it is possible to reach monotheism via polytheism, it is at least a remarkable fact that of all the peoples of the world no single one is known to have done so. It can hardly be alleged that it is by external, accidental circumstances that the consummation has been prevented. Had some one, some

few peoples, only failed, their failure might be imputed to some accident due to their peculiar circumstances. But when the same experiment has been tried under the most diverse conditions of culture, clime, and time; when the circumstances have been varied to the utmost; when the seed has been sown in soils the most different and been developed under climatic conditions the most diverse, and yet has always refused to produce monotheism, or anything but polytheism; the inference seems to be that the refusal is due not to the circumstances being unfavourable, but to the seeds being of the wrong kind.

We can, however, go further than this, if we allow ourselves to be guided by the actual facts of religious history and not by the uncertain analogy drawn from the life-history of plant and animal organisms. What the actual polytheisms known to science pass into is either fetishism, as is the case with most African tribes,1 or pantheism, as in Egypt; never monotheism. The tendencies which have been supposed in polytheism to make for monotheism have always been purely pantheistic-speculative rather than practical, metaphysical rather than religious; and, as being metaphysical speculations, have always been confined to the cultured few, and have never even leavened the polytheism of the masses. A god supreme over all the other members of the pantheon is very different from the one and only God of even the lowest form of monotheism; and the fact that Zeus lords it over the other gods, as a human king over his subjects, is no evidence or sign of any monotheistic tendency: it proceeds from no inner consciousness that the object of man's worship is one and indivisible, one and the same God always. It is scarcely a religious idea at all: it is not drawn from the spiritual depths of man's nature, it is a conception borrowed from politics, for the purpose not of unifying the multiplicity of gods, but of putting their multiplicity on an intelligible and permanent basis. On the other hand, the idea of a world-soul, a one reality of which all things animate or inanimate, human and divine, are the manifestations, does indeed reduce the multiplicity of the gods, amongst other things, to unity; but it is a metaphysical speculation, not a 1 See for this, Chapter XIII. supra, "Fetishism,"

fact of which the religious consciousness has direct intuition; and hence it is never, like a purely religious movement, propagated through the mass of average, unphilosophical mankind. They are not to be touched by complicated arguments; and the philosopher is not consumed by that zeal of the Lord which enables the religious reformer to fire his fellow-men. The prophets of Israel denounced the worship

of false gods. The philosophers of Egypt found accommodation for them as manifestations of the one real existence. The belief that the one reality is equally real in all its forms, and that all its forms are equally unreal, is not a creed which leads to the breaking of idols, the destruction of groves and high places, or the denunciation of all worship save at the altar of the Lord. Pantheism is the philosophical complement of a pantheon; but the spirit which produced the monotheism of the Jews must have been something very different. Nor is it easy to see why among the Jews alone monarchy should have yielded monotheism. If monarchy, like monotheism, had been an institution peculiar to the Jews, there might be something in the argument. But monarchy has flourished amongst most peoples, much more successfully than among the Jews, and nowhere has it had monotheism for its concomitant. Even "the supposed monotheistic tendency of the Semitic as opposed to the Hellenic or Aryan system of religion," which "is in the main nothing more than a consequence of the alliance of religion with monarchy, . . . cannot in its natural development fairly be said to have come near to monotheism." Amongst the Jews, alone of the Semites, did it follow a line other than that of "its natural development."

With syncretism-the practice of not merely identifying different gods, but of fusing their cults into one ritual-the case is somewhat different. On the one hand, it is probable that several gods have gone to the making up of, say, the one god Apollo, in whose worship the rites of all are united. On the other, it is certain that for the Greek of any recorded period the personality of Apollo was as individual as his own. But even if we were to admit that the ritual of Jehovah is to be accounted for in this way, we should be no 1 1 Robertson Smith, op. cit. 74 and 75,