term," "monotheism properly so called," "monotheism which excludes
polytheism," etc. Moreover, he maintains that we cannot, from historical
sources, learn what conceptions men first had of God. Even when speaking
of the Old Testament record, he says: "These chapters (of Genesis),
although they plainly teach monotheism and represent the God whose words
and acts are recorded in the Bible as no mere national God, but the only
true God, they do not teach what is alone in the question--that there
was a primitive monotheism, a monotheism revealed and known from the
beginning. They give no warrant to the common assumption that God
revealed monotheism to Adam, Noah, and others before the Flood, and that
the traces of monotheistic beliefs and tendencies in heathendom are
derivable from the tradition of this primitive and antediluvian
monotheism. The one true God is represented as making himself known by
particular words and in particular ways to Adam, but is nowhere said to
have taught him that He only was God." It is plain that Professor Flint
is here dealing with a conception of monotheism which is exclusive of
all other gods. And his view is undoubtedly correct, so far as Adam was
concerned. There was no more need of teaching him that his God was the
only God, than that Eve was the only woman. With Noah the case is not so
plain. He doubtless worshipped God amid the surroundings of polytheistic
heathenism. Enoch probably had a similar environment, and there is no
good reason for supposing that their monotheism may not have been as
exclusive as that of Abraham. But with respect to the Gentile nations,
the dim traces of this monism or henotheism which Professor Flint seems
to accord to Adam and to Noah, is all that we are contending for, and
all that is necessary to the argument of this lecture. We may even admit
that heathen deities may sometimes have been called by different names
while the one source of power was intended. Different names seem to have
been employed to represent different manifestations of the one God of
the Old Testament according to His varied relations toward His people.
There are those who deny this polyonomy, as Max Mueller has called it,
and who maintain that the names in the earliest Veda represented
distinct deities; but, by similar reasoning, Professor Tiele and others
insist that three different Hebrew Gods, according to their respective
names, were worshipped in successive periods of the Jewish history