portions are demonstrably ancient; and the last stage of the Egyptian
religion .... was by far the grossest and most corrupt." (_"Religion of
Ancient Egypt,"_ p. 95.) This opinion is supported by the testimony of
the Egyptian inscriptions. In the very oldest inscriptions reference is
had to a Supreme God and Lord of all, to whom no shrines were raised,
whose abode was unknown, who was not graven in stone, while the Egptian
[tr. note: sic] of a later day adored the crocodile, the ichneumon,
serpents, bulls, cats, and ibises.

The history of Hindu belief presents testimony of a still more startling
nature. In the Vedas we find statements and prayers which are clear
proof of an early Monotheism. Thus the IX book of the Rig Veda contains
the following prayer. "Who is the God to whom we shall offer our
sacrifice? The one-born Lord of all that is; he established the heaven
and sky; he is the one king of the breathing and awakening world; he
through whom the heaven was established; he who measured out the light
in the air--he who alone is God above all gods." Here the belief in one
Supreme Being is clearly set forth. And yet this faith in one God in the
course of time degenerated into a worship of 33,000 divinities--until
Gautama the Buddha evolved a system that denied the very existence of
God.

Turning to Greece we have the testimony of Prof. Max Mueller to this
effect: "When we ascend to the distant heights of Greek history the idea
of God, as the Supreme Being, stands before us as a simple fact."
(_"Essays,"_ II, p. 146.) Carl Boettcher, in his great work on the
Treeworship of the Greeks, maintains: "As far as the legends of the
Greeks can be traced into prehistoric ages, the entire nation worshipped
a single God, nameless, without statues, without a temple, invisible and
omnipresent." This he regards as a tradition of "irrefutable inner
truthfulness.... The beginning of Polytheism therefore represents the
_second_ phase of Greek religion, which was preceded by a Monotheism."
Every student of Greek literature knows that this original belief at an
early age gave place to a worship of the gods on Olympus, a worship
which in turn gave way to openly avowed atheism. The Greeks were aware
of this decay. Plato, in his Phaidros (274 B) quotes Socrates as saying:
"I know of an old saying, that our ancestors knew what constituted the
true worship of God; if we could but discover what it was, would we then
have need of _human_ the