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Thus, from every point of view, and on every side, Animism is full of the seeds of religious degeneration, which do not and cannot exist in what I take to be the earliest known form of the theistic conception: that of a Being about whose metaphysical nature spirit or not spirit no questions were asked, as Dr. Brinton long ago remarked.
Now, the theistic idea of God, which sees the Creator in an uninterrupted connection with his creation, is in itself the more scientific one: for a God who, although the author of the world, would not know how to find, nor intend to find, a way of communication with his creation, would certainly be an idea theologically inconceivable.
We have often been told that this or the other people 'has no religious ideas at all'. But later we hear that they do possess a belief in spirits, and very often better information proves that, in one stage or other of advance or degradation, the theistic conception of a Maker and Judge of the world is also present.
It is quite true that the evidence of purpose discernible in the whole structure of the universe proclaims the Deity to be personal; but, as Mr. Mallock says, "the theistic doctrine of God is not a doctrine that the supreme mind acts with purpose, but a doctrine that it acts with purpose of a highly specialised kind" viz., benevolent purpose.
These general positions, which in their broad lines are common to practically all of the Ante-Nicene Fathers, serve to confirm the historical interpretation of the place occupied by early Christian theistic thought, and will pave the way to an appreciation of their use of the arguments for the existence of God. Adversus Grammaticos, I, 44. Hatch: Hibbert Lectures, 1888, Lect.
Such great expressions of emotional theism as the Râmâyana of Tulsi Das are likely to find sympathetic readers in Europe, but the most original feature of Indian thought is that, as already mentioned, it produces systems which can hardly be refused the name of religion and yet are hardly theistic.
SEXTIUS PYTHAGOREUS there were two born of this name, father and son wrote in Greek, reproducing the oracular style of Heraclitus. The gnuomai, which were translated and christianised by Rufinus, were stamped with a strongly theistic character.
Take, for example, the theistic proposition: There is a Supreme Being; and on the other hand, the atheistic counter-statement: There exists no Supreme Being; or, in psychology: Everything that thinks possesses the attribute of absolute and permanent unity, which is utterly different from the transitory unity of material phenomena; and the counter-proposition: The soul is not an immaterial unity, and its nature is transitory, like that of phenomena.
The presumption, from the general law of progress, is that, when there is a chronological difference, the socially lower precedes the socially higher. Religion and magic come to be mutually antagonistic, except in cases where religious authorities adopt magical procedures, giving them a theistic and socially useful coloring.
This attitude towards and use of the theistic argument, so radically different from that of the Greek philosophers, perpetuated itself in the post-Nicene literature of the Christian Church, and, in its main features, remained unaltered, until the time when men who had abandoned the faith in the Word which had been the main stay of the ante-Nicene writers, and who yet were unwilling to abandon the great theistic idea for which the world was indebted to Christianity alone, sought to justify this idea on the basis of reason.
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