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While one must agree with Hume, then, it is, nevertheless, to be wished that he had not set the bad example of calling polytheists "superstitious atheists." It probably did not occur to him that, by a parity of reasoning, the Unitarians might justify the application of the same language to the Ultramontanes, and vice versâ.
They were polytheists, in so far as they admitted the existence of other Elohim of divine rank beside Jahveh; they differed from ordinary polytheists, in so far as they believed that Jahveh was the supreme god and the one proper object of their own national worship.
The apostle of Christianity might justifiably speak to polytheists of the God 'whom ye ignorantly worship. It is true, and it is important to notice, that the sacrifices and the rites and ceremonies, which together made up the service of worship, had been consciously and intentionally rendered to deities represented in human form; and, in this sense, anthropomorphic deities had been worshipped.
The world in which Christianity found itself had a host of deities a god for the sea and another for the wind, a god of the hearth and a god of the empire, and so on. Today it is only too easy to obey one motive in the home and another in one's business, to follow one principle in private life and another in national life, and to be polytheists again.
In brief, what is the present position of India in regard to religious belief; and in particular, what are the prevailing beliefs about God? A rough classification of the theological belief of the Hindus of the present day would be the multitude are polytheists; the new-educated are monotheists; the brahmanically educated are professed pantheists.
All savages are Polytheists, just as were the Hebrews, whose god "Jehovah" was but their special god, stronger than the gods of the nations around them, gods whose existence they never denied; but as thought grew, the superior minds in each nation rose over the multitude of deities to the idea of one Supreme Being working in many ways, and the loftiest flights of the "prophets" of the Jewish Scriptures may be paralleled by those of the sages of other creeds.
To appreciate the attitude of the Hindu mind to the doctrines of Sin and Salvation, we must return again to the rough division of Hindus into first, the mass of the people, polytheists; secondly, the educated classes, now largely monotheists; thirdly, the brahmanically educated and the ascetics, pantheists. It is only with the monotheists that we have now to deal.
One point on which Waterland insists constantly and strongly is that the scheme of those who would pay divine honours to Christ, and yet deny that He is very God, cannot escape from the charge of polytheism. 'You are tritheists, he urges, 'in the same sense as Pagans are called polytheists. One supreme and two inferior Gods is your avowed doctrine; that is, three Gods.
The key of the difficulty is on its other side, in the doctrine of the unity of God, which was not only taught by Jews and Christians, but generally admitted by serious heathens. The philosophers spoke of a dim Supreme far off from men, and even the polytheists were not unwilling to subordinate their motley crew of gods to some mysterious divinity beyond them all.
I confess that the way is open for improvement among Protestants in this respect, but is it not just as open for a similar improvement among unbelievers in the scientific field of thought? There we find Atheists, Pantheists, Deists, Polytheists and Theists. In their history will be found an immense mass of contradictory opinions. Man is imperfect in many of his attainments.
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