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.

In whatever mode, natural or supernatural, we choose to account for the
early Monotheism of the Hebrews, there can be no question that its
reception by the Gentiles was only rendered possible by the slow
preparation which the human mind had undergone from the philosophers.
In the age of the Caesars nearly the whole educated and cultivated class
had outgrown the polytheistic creed, and though individually liable to
returns of the superstition of their childhood, were predisposed (such
of them as did not reject all religion whatever) to the acknowledgment
of one Supreme Providence. It is vain to object that Christianity did
not find the majority of its early proselytes among the educated class:
since, except in Palestine, its teachers and propagators were mainly of
that class--many of them, like St Paul, well versed in the mental
culture of their time; and they had evidently found no intellectual
obstacle to the new doctrine in their own minds. We must not be deceived
by the recrudescence, at a much later date, of a metaphysical Paganism
in the Alexandrian and other philosophical schools, provoked not by
attachment to Polytheism, but by distaste for the political and social
ascendancy of the Christian teac