We have no wish to dispute the matter with
those who believe that Monotheism was the primitive religion,
transmitted to our race from its first parents in uninterrupted
tradition. By their own acknowledgment, the tradition was lost by all
the nations of the world except a small and peculiar people, in whom it
was miraculously kept alive, but who were themselves continually lapsing
from it, and in all the earlier parts of their history did not hold it
at all in its full meaning, but admitted the real existence of other
gods, though believing their own to be the most powerful, and to be the
Creator of the world. A greater proof of the unnaturalness of Monotheism
to the human mind before a certain period in its development, could not
well be required. The highest form of Monotheism, Christianity, has
persisted to the present time in giving partial satisfaction to the
mental dispositions that lead to Polytheism, by admitting into its
theology the thoroughly polytheistic conception of a devil. When
Monotheism, after many centuries, made its way to the Greeks and Romans
from the small corner of the world where it existed, we know how the
notion of daemons facilitated its reception, by making it unnecessary
for Christians to deny the existence of the gods previously believed in,
it being sufficient to place them under the absolute power of the new
God, as the gods of Olympus were already under that of Zeus, and as the
local deities of all the subjugated nations had been subordinated by
conquest to the divine patrons of the Roman State.
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