ong senses without running a serious risk of deceiving ourselves as
well as others, it appears better on all accounts to adhere strictly to
the common meaning of the name of God as signifying a powerful
supernatural and on the whole beneficent spirit, akin in nature to man;
and if any of us have ceased to believe in such a being we should
refrain from applying the old word to the new faith, and should find
some other and more appropriate term to express our meaning. At all
events, speaking for myself, I intend to use the name of God
consistently in the familiar sense, and I would beg my hearers to bear
this steadily in mind.

[Sidenote: Monotheism and polytheism.]

You will have observed that I have spoken of natural theology as a
reasoned knowledge of a God or gods. There is indeed nothing in the
definition of God which I have adopted to imply that he is unique, in
other words, that there is only one God rather than several or many
gods. It is true that modern European thinkers, bred in a monotheistic
religion, commonly overlook polytheism as a crude theory unworthy the
serious attention of philosophers; in short, the champions and the
assailants of religion in Europe alike for the most part tacitly assume
that there is either one God or none. Yet some highly civilised nations
of antiquity and of modern times, such as the ancient Egyptians, Greeks,
and Romans, and the modern Chinese and Hindoos, have accepted the
polytheistic explanation of the world, and as no reasonable man will
deny the philosophical subtlety of the Greeks and the Hindoos, to say
nothing of the rest, a theory of the universe which has commended itself
to them deserves perhaps more consideration than it has commonly
received from Western philosophers; certainly it cannot be ignored in an
historical enquiry into the origin of religion.

[Sidenote: A natural knowledge of God can only be acquired by
experience.]

If there is such a thing as natural theology, that is, a knowledge of a
God or gods acquired by our natural faculties alone without the aid of a
special revelation, it follows that it must be obtained by one or other
of the methods by which all our natural knowledge is conveyed to us.
Roughly speaking, these methods are two in number, namely, intuition and
experience. Now if we ask ourselves, Do we know God intuitively in the
same sense in which we know intuitively our own sensations and the
simplest truths of mathematics, I think most men