and have instigated the Aryan
mind to the worship of many gods? Could the monotheistic instinct of
the Semitic race, if an instinct, have been so frequently obscured, or
the polytheistic instinct of the Aryan race, if an instinct, so
completely annihilated, as to allow the Jews to worship on all the
high places round Jerusalem, and the Greeks and Romans to become
believers in Christ? Fishes never fly, and cats never catch frogs.
These are the difficulties into which we are led; and they arise
simply and solely from our using words for their sound rather than for
their meaning. We begin by playing with words, but in the end the
words will play with us.

There are, in fact, various kinds of monotheism, and it becomes our
duty to examine more carefully what they mean and how they arise.
There is one kind of monotheism, though it would more properly be
called theism, or henotheism, which forms the birthright of every
human being. What distinguishes man from all other creatures, and not
only raises him above the animal world, but removes him altogether
from the confines of a merely natural existence, is the feeling of
sonship inherent in and inseparable from human nature. That feeling
may find expression in a thousand ways, but there breathes through all
of them the inextinguishable conviction, 'It is He that hath made us,
and not we ourselves.' That feeling of sonship may with some races
manifest itself in fear and trembling, and it may drive whole
generations into religious madness and devil worship. In other
countries it may tempt the creature into a fatal familiarity with the
Creator, and end in an apotheosis of man, or a headlong plunging of
the human into the divine. It may take, as with the Jews, the form of
a simple assertion that 'Adam was the son of God,' or it may be
clothed in the mythological phraseology of the Hindus, that Manu, or
man, was the descendant of Svayambhu, the Self-existing. But, in some
form or other, the feeling of dependence on a higher Power breaks
through in all the religions of the world, and explains to us the
meaning of St. Paul, 'that God, though in times past He suffered all
nations to walk in their own ways, nevertheless He left not Himself
without witness, in that He did good and gave us rain from heaven, and
fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness.'

This primitive intuition of God and the ineradicable feeling of
dependence on God, could only have been the result