of a primitive
revelation, in the truest sense of that word. Man, who owed his
existence to God, and whose being centred and rested in God, saw and
felt God as the only source of his own and of all other existence. By
the very act of the creation, God had revealed Himself. There He was,
manifested in His works, in all His majesty and power, before the face
of those to whom He had given eyes to see and ears to hear, and into
whose nostrils He had breathed the breath of life, even the Spirit of
God.

This primitive intuition of God, however, was in itself neither
monotheistic nor polytheistic, though it might become either,
according to the expression which it took in the languages of man. It
was this primitive intuition which supplied either the subject or the
predicate in all the religions of the world, and without it no
religion, whether true or false, whether revealed or natural, could
have had even its first beginning. It is too often forgotten by those
who believe that a polytheistic worship was the most natural
unfolding of religious life, that polytheism must everywhere have been
preceded by a more or less conscious theism. In no language does the
plural exist before the singular. No human mind could have conceived
the idea of gods without having previously conceived the idea of a
god. It would be, however, quite as great a mistake to imagine,
because the idea of a god must exist previously to that of gods, that
therefore a belief in One God preceded everywhere the belief in many
gods. A belief in God as exclusively One, involves a distinct negation
of more than one God, and that negation is possible only after the
conception, whether real or imaginary, of many gods.

The primitive intuition of the Godhead is neither monotheistic nor
polytheistic, and it finds its most natural expression in the simplest
and yet the most important article of faith--that God is God. This
must have been the faith of the ancestors of mankind previously to any
division of race or confusion of tongues. It might seem, indeed, as if
in such a faith the oneness of God, though not expressly asserted, was
implied, and that it existed, though latent, in the first revelation
of God. History, however, proves that the question of oneness was yet
undecided in that primitive faith, and that the intuition of God was
not yet secured against the illusions of a double vision. There are,
in reality, two kinds of oneness which, when we enter into
met