efore us. How much may we expect to prove from the early
history of the non-Christian systems? Not certainly that all nations
once received a knowledge of the Old Testament revelation, as some have
claimed, nor that all races possessed at the beginning of their several
historic periods one and the same monotheistic faith. We cannot prove
from non-scriptural sources that their varying monotheistic conceptions
sprang from a common belief. We cannot prove either the supernatural
revelation which Professor Max Mueller emphatically rejects, nor the
identity of the well-nigh universal henotheisms which he professes to
believe. We cannot prove that the worship of one God as supreme did not
coexist with a sort of worship of inferior deities or ministering
spirits. Almost as a rule, the worship of ancestors, or spirits, or
rulers, or the powers of nature, or even totems and fetishes has been
rendered as subordinate to the worship of the one supreme deity who
created and upholds all things. Even the monotheism of Judaism and of
Christianity has been attended with the belief in angels and the worship
of intercessory saints, to say nothing of the many superstitions which
prevail among the more ignorant classes. We shall only attempt to show
that monotheism, in the sense of worshipping _one God as supreme_, is
found in nearly all the early teachings of the world. That these crude
faiths are one in the origin is only presumable, if we leave the
testimony of the Bible out of the account.

When on a summer afternoon we see great shafts of light arising and
spreading fan-shaped from behind a cloud which lies along the western
horizon, we have a strong presumption that they all spring from one
great luminary toward which they converge, although that luminary is
hidden from our view. So tracing the convergence of heathen faiths with
respect to one original monotheism, back to the point where the
prehistoric obscurity begins, we may on the same principle say that all
the evidence in the case, and it is not small, points toward a common
origin for the early religious conceptions of mankind.

Professor Robert Flint, in his scholarly article on theism in "The
Britannica," seems to discard the idea that the first religion of
mankind was monotheism; but a careful study of his position will show
that he has in view those conceptions of monotheism which are common to
us, or, as he expresses it, "monotheism in the ordinary or proper sense
of the