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From early animism in its manifold expressions, through polytheism, kathenotheism, henotheism, to monotheism, and so out into loftier possibilities of conceiving the divine nature and purpose the main road which man has traveled in his religious development now is traceable. Nor is there any place where it is more easily traceable than in our own Hebrew-Christian tradition.
In each of these cases, the first principle is found operating, ever augmenting the ranks; monodiabolism being as impossible as monotheism; and hence the importance of fully establishing that proposition.
Muller says that De Brosses 'holds that all nations had to begin with fetichism, to be followed afterwards by polytheism and monotheism. This sentence would lead some readers to suppose that De Brosses, in his speculations, was looking for the origin of religion; but, in reality, his work is a mere attempt to explain a certain element in ancient religion and mythology.
Nor must it be forgotten that Philo was preaching spiritual monotheism not only to Jews, but also to the Hellenic world, for whom it was a vast bound from their naturalistic polytheism. Zealous as he was for the pure faith, he realized that mankind could not attain it directly, but must approach it by conceptions of the One God gradually increasing in profundity and truth.
King Chut-en-Aten, or Glory of the Sun-disk, the royal fanatic who made this attempt at unity, went great lengths to accomplish his object, but the attempt was a failure, and was abandoned after his death even by the members of his own family. What Chut-en-Aten tried to introduce perhaps came nearer true monotheism than anything that ever existed in Egypt.
In Persia, where the original pantheon was almost the same as that of the Veda, this idea produced monotheism: the minor deities became angels and the chief deity a Lord of hosts who wages a successful struggle against an independent but still inferior spirit of evil. But in India the Spirits of Good and Evil are not thus personified.
He seems to have proposed to himself a twofold object: first, to account for the prevalence of the various forms of natural religion and superstition, without recognizing any valid evidence for the existence of supernatural powers; and, secondly, to account for the origin of Judaism and Christianity, or, as he calls it, of Monotheism, without recognizing the reality of any Divine Revelation.
The same opinion was held years ago by Julius Oppert, the Assyriologist, who was led to a belief in "a universal primitive monotheism as the basis of all religions." In short, the majority of independent and unprejudiced students of heathen beliefs, from the days of A. W. v.
Hence the importance of its attestation to this fact that all Christians everywhere, both Jewish, who had been trained in strict monotheism, and Gentile, who had burned incense at many a foul shrine, were perfectly joined together in this, that in all their need they called on the name of Jesus Christ as Lord and brought to Him, as divine, adoration not to be rendered to any creatures.
The long story of religious effort is not from fetichism to monotheism, as Comte read it; nor is its only possible goal inside the limits of the ego, as Feuerbach and the other Neo-Hegelians assert; but it is on its theoretical side to develope with greater and greater distinctness the immeasurable reality of pure thought, to dispense more and more with the quantification of the absolute, and to avoid in the representation of that Being the use of the technic of concrete existence.
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