that the
former were immortal. A god came to be identical with an immortal man
and a man was deified, reputed as a god, when it was deemed that at his
death he had not really died. Of certain heroes it was believed that
they were alive in the kingdom of the dead. And this is a point of great
importance in estimating the value of the concept of the divine.

In those republics of gods there was always some predominating god, some
real monarch. It was through the agency of this divine monarchy that
primitive peoples were led from monocultism to monotheism. Hence
monarchy and monotheism are twin brethren. Zeus, Jupiter, was in process
of being converted into an only god, just as Jahwe originally one god
among many others, came to be converted into an only god, first the god
of the people of Israel, then the god of humanity, and finally the god
of the whole universe.

Like monarchy, monotheism had a martial origin. "It is only on the march
and in time of war," says Robertson Smith in _The Prophets of
Israel_,[38] "that a nomad people feels any urgent need of a central
authority, and so it came about that in the first beginnings of national
organization, centring in the sanctuary of the ark, Israel was thought
of mainly as the host of Jehovah. The very name of Israel is martial,
and means 'God (_El_) fighteth,' and Jehovah in the Old Testament is
Iahwe Cebaeoth--the Jehovah of the armies of Israel. It was on the
battlefield that Jehovah's presence was most clearly realized; but in
primitive nations the leader in time of war is also the natural judge in
time of peace."

God, the only God, issued, therefore, from man's sense of divinity as a
warlike, monarchical and social God. He revealed himself to the people
as a whole, not to the individual. He was the God of a people and he
jealously exacted that worship should be rendered to him alone. The
transition from this monocultism to monotheism was effected largely by
the individual action, more philosophical perhaps than theological, of
the prophets. It was, in fact, the individual activity of the prophets
that individualized the divinity. And above all by making the divinity
ethical.

Subsequently reason--that is, philosophy--took possession of this God
who had arisen in the human consciousness as a consequence of the sense
of divinity in man, and tended to define him and convert him into an
idea. For to define a thing is to idealize it, a process which
necessitates the ab