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The German name for idol Abgott, that is, "ex-god," or "dethroned god" sums up in a single etymology the history of the havoc wrought by monotheism among the ancient symbols of deity.

It requires of us great efforts to bring back those Musselmen, descendants of Buddhists, into the path of the true God. As regards the Europeans, it is quite a different affair. Not only do they profess the essential principles of monotheism, but they are, in a sense, adorers of Buddha, with almost the same rites as the lamas who inhabit Thibet.

The study of false systems brings to light an almost unanimous testimony for the existence of a vague primeval monotheism, and thus affords a strong presumptive corroboration of the Scriptural doctrine of man's apostasy from the worship of the true God.

John Fiske wrote: The hypothesis of inspiration "conveys most certainly a conception of Divine action as local, special, and transitory; and in so far as it does this, it bears the marks of that heathen mode of philosophy which was current when Christian monotheism arose." The conclusion is, that there is no inspired Bible. Nor indeed an absolute religion.

And if monotheism displaces polytheism, it does so because it is found by experience to be the more faithful interpretation of that idea of God which even the polytheist has in his soul. In the same way, and for the same reasons, polytheism is not fetishism under another name. The gods of a community are not the fetishes of individuals. The difference between them is not a mere difference of name.

It began with Homer not earlier than 600 B.C., and direct accounts of the religion of the Greeks are not traced beyond 560 B.C. But Welcker, whose examinations have been exhaustive, has, in the opinion of Max Müller, fairly established the primitive monotheism of the Greeks.

Moreover, the rivalries of a hundred priesthoods imparted to polytheism an intrinsic weakness; but monotheism implies centralization, an organized hierarchy, and therefore concentration of power.

Reconciliation, not abnegation, is what they mean. Even those religions which teach in its strictness the oneness of God have rarely separated from his personality the attribute of sex. He is the father, pater et genitor, of all beings. The monotheism which we find in Greece and India generally took this form.

The Asas, or gods, lived in Asgard, a mythic communal village, with its Thing or Council, the very counterpart of the communal village of Iceland. Olympus was a Greek city. Still further in the study of mythologic philosophy we see that more and more supremacy falls into the hands of the few, until monotheism is established on the plan of the empire.

The conjunction of pagan polytheism with Judaic monotheism, which had endeavoured by other means to save the personality of God, gave birth to the feeling of the Catholic God, a God who is a society, as the pagan God of whom I have spoken was a society, and who at the same time is one, as the God of Israel finally became one.