all, the races at the dawn of history, a very important point
will have been gained. The late Dr. Henry B. Smith, after a careful
perusal of Ebrard's elaborate presentation of the religions of the
ancient and the modern world, and his clear proofs that they had at
first been invariably monotheistic and had gradually lapsed into
ramified forms of polytheism, says in his review of Ebrard's work: "We
do not know where to find a more weighty reply to the assumptions and
theories of those writers who persist in claiming, according to the
approved hypothesis of a merely naturalistic evolution, that the
primitive state of mankind was the lowest and most debased form of
polytheistic idolatry, and that the higher religions have been developed
out of these base rudiments. Dr. Ebrard shows conclusively that the
facts all lead to another conclusion, that gross idolatry is a
degeneration of mankind from antecedent and purer forms of religious
worship.... He first treats of the civilized nations of antiquity, the
Aryan and Indian religions, the Vedas, the Indra period of Brahmanism
and Buddhism; then of the religion of the Iranians, the Avesta of the
Parsees; next of the Greeks and Romans, the Egyptians, the Canaanites,
and the heathen Semitic forms of worship, including the Phoenicians,
Assyrians, and Babylonians. His second division is devoted to the
half-civilized and savage races in the North and West of Europe, in Asia
and Polynesia (Tartars, Mongols, Malays, and Cushites); then the races
of America, including a minute examination of the relations of the
different races here to the Mongols, Japanese, and old Chinese
immigrations."[127]

Ebrard himself, in summing up the results of these prolonged
investigations, says: "We have nowhere been able to discover the least
trace of any forward and upward movement from fetichism to polytheism,
and from that again to a gradually advancing knowledge of the one God;
but, on the contrary, we have found among all the peoples of the heathen
world a most decided tendency to sink from an earlier and relatively
purer knowledge of God toward something lower."[128]

If these conclusions, reached by Ebrard and endorsed by the scholarly
Dr. Henry B. Smith, are correct, they are of great importance; they
bring to the stand the witness of the false religions themselves upon an
issue in which historic testimony as distinguished from mere theories is
in special demand in our time. Of similar import are