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Updated: June 6, 2025
The Hebrew Scriptures uniformly represent the non- idolatrous and monotheistic peoples, from Abraham to Cyrus, as lower in what we now call the scale of civilisation, than the idolatrous and polytheistic peoples about them.
In the solitude of such a crowd, or in the noise of such dissipation, anyone could find a retreat atheists who had been banished from Athens, devotees from the Ganges, monotheistic Jews, blasphemers from Asia Minor.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, we may now say that Indian Hindu society consisted of a vast polytheistic mass with a very thin, an often invisible, film of pantheists on the top. The nineteenth century of enlightenment and contact with Christianity has seen the wide acceptance of the monotheistic conception by the new-educated India.
The initiative for the passage to the Monotheistic period came from Judaea, and Comte attempts to show that this could not have been otherwise. His analysis of this period is the most interesting part of his survey.
Yaou's son Shun was an equally remarkable man, wise and accomplished, who lived only to advance the happiness of his subjects. At that period the religion of China was probably monotheistic.
And when, finally, in the earlier centuries of our era, the old gods disappeared, the rise of monotheistic belief was accompanied by a transformation of the conception of the future of the soul; it was to be no longer the inert earthly thing of the old theories but instinct with a high life that fitted it to be the companion of divine beings and the sharer of their knowledge and their ideals.
Above all, the monotheistic idea, even if associated with the name of Zeus, tended to become an abstract conception with little relation to the national god of Hellas, whom Phidias embodied in his Olympian statue. The philosophic or theological conception of a monotheistic deity does not, in fact, seem to lend itself at any time to impressive artistic representation.
Even when it has become monotheistic, it may continue to speak of the one God as 'a great god above all other gods, in terms which are survivals of an earlier stage of belief.
In the religious effusions of Mesopotamia, we sometimes find an accent of exalted piety recalling the tone of the Hebrew scriptures; but it does not appear that the monotheistic idea towards which they were ever tending, but without actually reaching it and becoming penetrated by its truth, had ever acquired sufficient consistence to stimulate the Chaldæan artist to the creation of a type superior in beauty and nobility to those of gods in the second rank.
A beautiful external nature tended to produce a much less austere spirit a spirit less sharply monotheistic, if I may use the expression, which imprinted a charming and idyllic character on all the dreams of Galilee. The saddest country in the world is perhaps the region round about Jerusalem.
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