ns did with the Devas of their Brahmanic ancestors;
or by taking a higher view, and looking upon the Elohim as so many
names, invented with the honest purpose of expressing the various
aspects of the Deity, though in time diverted from their original
purpose. This is the view taken by St. Paul of the religion of the
Greeks when he came to declare unto them 'Him whom they ignorantly
worshipped,' and the same view was taken by Abraham. Whatever the
names of the Elohim, worshipped by the numerous clans of his race,
Abraham saw that all the Elohim were meant for God, and thus Elohim,
comprehending by one name everything that ever had been or could be
called divine, became the name with which the monotheistic age was
rightly inaugurated,--a plural, conceived and construed as a singular.
Jehovah was all the Elohim, and therefore there could be no other God.
From this point of view the Semitic name of the Deity, Elohim, which
seemed at first not only ungrammatical but irrational, becomes
perfectly clear and intelligible, and it proves better than anything
else that the true monotheism could not have risen except on the ruins
of a polytheistic faith. It is easy to scoff at the gods of the
heathen, but a cold-hearted philosophical negation of the gods of the
ancient world is more likely to lead to Deism or Atheism than to a
belief in the One living God, the Father of all mankind, 'who hath
made of one blood all nations of men, for to dwell on all the face of
the earth; and hath determined the times before appointed, and the
bounds of their habitation; that they should seek the Lord, if haply
they might feel after Him, and find Him, though He be not far from
every one of us: for in Him we live, and move, and have our being; as
certain also of your own poets have said, For we are also His
offspring.'

Taking this view of the historical growth of the idea of God, many of
the difficulties which M. Renan has to overcome by most elaborate and
sometimes hair-splitting arguments, disappear at once. M. Renan, for
instance, dwells much on Semitic proper names in which the names of
the Deity occur, and he thinks that, like the Greek names Theodorus or
Theodotus, instead of Zenodotus, they prove the existence of a faith
in one God. We should say they may or may not. As Devadatta, in
Sanskrit, may mean either 'given by God,' or 'given by the gods,' so
every proper name which M. Renan quotes, whether of Jews, or Edomites,
Ishmaelites, Ammoni