II.

GERMS OF RELIGIOUS AND ETHICAL TRUTH IN

POLYTHEISM.

Taking a broad view of the spiritual history of mankind as one continuous life and growth, we can not but believe that polytheism, too, was a revelation of the Infinite, a necessary stage in the unfolding of the spirit of God in the human race. God has left none of His children without a ray of His light. The ways of God through all the domain of nature and of mind are those of gradual evolution from lower to ever higher forms, from the imperfect to the more perfect, from faint streaks of dawning truth unto the brightness of the perfect day. But of this we shall speak more fully when we come to treat of the subject of Revelation and religious development. In believing that a divine being was indwelling, and presiding over, every part and phenomenon of nature, polytheism. gave expression to the truth that Nature is no weltering mass of blind matter, no soulless mechanism, but is quick with conscious life and full of superhuman divine power. This is an immense gain made for true religion. In fact, monotheism could not have arisen at all, if the pagan theory of the world had not prepared the fruitful parent idea, out of which grew the belief in one almighty allpervading Intelligence, the Maker, Preserver, and Ruler of heaven and earth and all they contain.

The human mind, even in its undeveloped religious stage, in the polytheistic state, had grasped the fundamental idea on which all religion and philosophy will forever rest; the idea namely: mind, life, feeling, will power, thought is not confined to the brain of men and animals; it is not absolutely bound up with a bodily frame. Conscious life exists outside of man and animals and

manifests its energy in every possible form, visible or invisible, of the external world. Again, the conscious life did not for the first time in the existence of the world make its appearance in man and his inferior fellowcreatures. Gods, similar in character, qualities, loves, and hates to man or beast but superior to them in power and length of days, have existed in the heavens above and the earth beneath and in the waters under the earth, long before the human race or any animate being had been born on this globe. The monotheism of the prophets in its highest reaches, still firmly roots in this primary spiritual belief, in the belief of the pagans. For the central idea of our faith is: A universal creative Intelligence animates and pervades all nature; before the mountains were brought forth and the earth was born, and the world, even from Eternity to Eternity He was God.

The fact is, the belief that there are in the external world entities, powers, activities, and tendencies like those which distinguish the inner world of mind, lies at the very root of all religious knowledge, is the necessary condition of all truth. Without this pre-supposition, truth cognition would be impossible. How could the mind comprehend the world without, if that world had nothing in common with mind? How could the intelligence have any knowledge of nature, if nature were not somehow assumed to be related to intelligence? How could the things of nature be translated into thought, if they were not believed to be written in the characters of thought and could not be spelled out by the mind?

The most primitive men unconsciously started in all their thoughts, beliefs, and phantastic vagaries from this cardinal truth. The most advanced minds of prophets and philosophers base all knowledge and all faith upon this root-principle of the intelligence. The worshipers of Baal and Astarte and other gods shared the belief in mindlike powers existing and acting in nature outside of

man, with the prophets of Yahve, who is the spirit of all spirits, the cause and ground of all being. With this farreaching difference however: in polytheism consciousness, intelligence, will, in nature is broken up into a vast number of separate beings, into a teeming multitude of divine personalities or gods. Every part of nature exists by itself and for itself, and in and above every part there is a divine being, the conscious counterpart of the material object. In the monotheism of the prophets all nature is one in origin, cause, and purpose, a living rational unity, a growing harmony in Yahve, the universal Reason, the creative almighty Will, in whom all things and all spirits live, move, and have their being.

It is, of course, impossible to explain the rise of moral monotheism in Israel by showing its points of connection with polytheism. Just as little can Man be explained by pointing out the links of kinship subsisting between him and the ape. But it is in every respect important to know the basis of truth common to the partially developed and to the most highly evolved religion, and to bring into view the manifold service rendered by polytheism in preparing the seed and the soil for monotheism.

In its own crude and materialistic way polytheism taught with the utmost emphasis the fundamental religious truth that man stands in closest relations to his God and that his nature is of kin to that of the Deity. Practically this belief is the most important, the most influential of all religious doctrines. It brings down religion from the region of mere speculation and makes it the most human of all affairs. It elevates man to the Divine and brings the Divine down to the heart and into the very home of man. This faith has builded an ideal ladder between heaven and earth on which divine powers descend to mortal men, to protect, instruct them, and impart dignity to their life, and on which again mortal men ascend to share in the qualities, in the aims, and the glory of the Divinity. Man

is godlike, man is a child of the Deity-this was the intuitive faith alike of paganism and Yahvism. Only, the pagans took their godlikeness and their descent from the divine in a literal and physical sense. The members of every family, of every tribe and people believed themselves, in the material acceptation of the word, to be lineal descendants of their ancestral god, to have the blood of their divine forefather and ruler in their veins. As their gods were identical with visible parts of nature, so was, in their opinion, the relationship between men and their deity of a naturalistic and sensuous kind. The bond of union between them was mainly the kinship of animalism. Still, low as was the pagan conception of the mutual relations between man and his god, it was yet the fruitful germ out of which there arose in the religion of the prophets the sublime conception of man being made after the spiritual likeness and in the moral similitude of the Lord of all spirits, of Yahve, the creative Reason and Love. Countless ages had believed that man was the physical image and offspring of his gods. Thereby the human mind was prepared to receive the message of monotheism that man is the spiritual image of the perfect Spirit, that the soul of man is a lamp of God, that Divine love and human righteousness are the true ties of kinship between the Creator and His creature. Thus polytheism is also in this respect seen to have been the natural precursor and path-maker of monotheism. There is no break in the development of the spirit of mankind. Even the greatest spiritual revolution, the victorious rise of monotheism in Israel, was an evolution from pre-existing forms of belief, and an involution of what was truest and best in the religious life of former ages.

This is evident from other points of organic contact and transition between polytheism and monotheism. Take the case of idol-worship or the adoration of images representing gods in human form. The vast majority of the

human race has from time immemorial to this day been clinging to idolatry, a mode of worship which the prophets denounced as the abomination of abominations, and which we too can not help regarding as a blasphemous and degrading practice. But we must be broad enough to recognize that idolatry helped on the religious education of the race. By presenting the gods to the eye of the worshiper in the figure of men, though of superhuman stature and majesty, it impressed upon the mind of the believer that the dread ruling powers of nature were related in their being and ways to man and that they possessed the attributes of humanity. For thousands and thousands of years the worship of the Divine under the symbol of man, the highest and noblest of all known creatures, tended in the eyes of the worshipers to humanize and moralize the gods and to vary them, in appearance and action, from the beast-gods and the bird-gods of still older and lower religions. The ground was thus prepared by idolatry for the sublime conception and the pure worship of God as taught by the prophets of Yahve. is not a man nor the son of man. He is unlike anything visible or material. Nothing corporeal and mortal should be compared to Him, though it can be exalted in beauty above all created things. But the spirit of man is the symbol of the Eternal, the soul of man is the faint image of the universal Soul, the moral qualities of man are a revelation of the attributes of His perfection. In other words, God is likest that which is highest, holiest, and divinest in man; like reason shining in darkness, like justice crushing the head of oppression, like love going forth to all flesh. Having gained an absolute victory within the Jewish church, monotheism may now without fear of danger freely acknowledge the debt of gratitude which it owes to the preparatory work and influence of idolatry.

God

The belief in an all-wise and all-just Divine Providence shaping the destinies of individuals and nations, quickening