hers. The fact was, that Monotheism had
become congenial to the cultivated mind: and a belief which has gained
the cultivated minds of any society, unless put down by force, is
certain, sooner or later, to reach the multitude. Indeed the multitude
itself had been prepared for it, as already hinted, by the more and more
complete subordination of all other deities to the supremacy of Zeus;
from which the step to a single Deity, surrounded by a host of angels,
and keeping in recalcitrant subjection an army of devils, was by no
means difficult.

By what means, then, had the cultivated minds of the Roman Empire been
educated for Monotheism? By the growth of a practical feeling of the
invariability of natural laws. Monotheism had a natural adaptation to
this belief, while Polytheism naturally and necessarily conflicted with
it. As men could not easily, and in fact never did, suppose that beings
so powerful had their power absolutely restricted, each to its special
department, the will of any divinity might always be frustrated by
another: and unless all their wills were in complete harmony (which
would itself be the most difficult to credit of all cases of
invariability, and would require beyond anything else the ascendancy
of a Supreme Deity) it was impossible that the course of any of the
phaenomena under their government could be invariable. But if, on the
contrary, all the phaenomena of the universe were under the exclusive
and uncontrollable influence of a single will, it was an admissible
supposition that this will might be always consistent with itself, and
might choose to conduct each class of its operations in an invariable
manner. In proportion, therefore, as the invariable laws of phaenomena
revealed themselves to observers, the theory which ascribed them all to
one will began to grow plausible; but must still have appeared
improbable until it had come to seem likely that invariability was the
common rule of all nature. The Greeks and Romans at the Christian era
had reached a point of advancement at which this supposition had become
probable. The admirable height to which geometry had already been
carried, had familiarized the educated mind with the conception of laws
absolutely invariable. The logical analysis of the intellectual
processes by Aristotle had shown a similar uniformity of law in the
realm of mind. In the concrete external world, the most imposing
phaenomena, those of the heavenly bodies, which by the