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According to Renan, evidences that the monotheism of the Semitic races was of a very early origin, appears in the fact that all their names for deity El, Elohim, Ilu, Baal, Bel, Adonai, Shaddai, and Allah denote one being and that supreme. These names have resisted all changes, and doubtless extend as far back as the Semitic language or the Semitic race.
He then restored the temples and the worship of Auramazda, as well as he was able; but it soon became evident that the religion was in a disorganised state and that it would be no easy matter to enforce a pure monotheism upon a nation of men who, in their hearts, were Magians, nature-worshippers; and who, through successive reigns, had been driven by force to the adoration of strange idols.
A "Law" or Thora, very anciently written on tables of stone, and which they attributed to their great liberator Moses, had become the code of Monotheism, and contained, as compared with the institutions of Egypt and Chaldea, powerful germs of social equality and morality.
In commemoration of the ceremonial slaying of victims in the vale of Mina at the end of the Greater Pilgrimage, Mahomet ordered two kids to be sacrificed at every festival, so that his people were continually reminded that at Mecca, beneath the infidel yoke, the sacred ritual, so peculiarly their own by virtue of the Abrahamic descent and their inexorable monotheism, was being unworthily performed.
Regarding the Zoroastrians of ancient Persia, M. Haug, the famous Zend scholar, asserts that "Monotheism was the leading idea of Zoroaster's theology;" he called God Ahura-mazda, i. e., "the Living Creator." Zoroaster did not teach a theological Dualism.
The wide sovereignty of Rome gave the apostles of Christ access to different nations, many of whom had become civilized under Roman influence. But pure monotheism existed only among the Jews. All other nations had a variety of gods and peculiar forms of worship.
Phases of Hebraism. Israel's tribal monotheism. Problems involved. The prophets put new wine in old bottles. Inspiration and authority. Beginnings of the Church. Bigotry turned into a principle. Penance accepted. Christianity combines optimism and asceticism. Reason smothered between the two. The essence of the good not adventitious but expressive.
Here it is evident how far we in our day are away from Feuerbach. His most beautiful passages in praise of the new religion of love are today unreadable. The only religion which Feuerbach examined closely is Christianity, the universal religion of the western world which is founded upon monotheism. He proves that the Christian God is only the fantastic reflection, the reflected image of man.
If there is but one God, who is the fount and cause of all being, it is easy to see why the truths of science should be universal and absolute, rather than local and diverse, as they would be were they subject to the jurisdiction of various local deities. The universality of nature's laws was inconceivable under polytheism. Monotheism thus found a ready access to many minds.
Thus, among all nations, through the darkest polytheism glimmer some faint sparks of monotheism, to which these idolaters have been led, not from reflection and profound thought, but by the study and natural progress of the common understanding. There are only three modes of proving the existence of a Deity, on the grounds of speculative reason.
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