TEE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 297 



polytheistic thought, but the nations that carried it to a higher degree 

 of perfection than any others were the ancient Greeks and Romans. 

 Costly temples were erected to the honor of their gods. Elaborate 

 ritualistic services were instituted to do them reverence. A great mul- 

 titude of priests and priestesses devoted their lives to finding out and 

 enforcing their will and purpose. The character and extent of this 

 form of religion are, however, so familiar that there is little need of 

 further explanation of it here. 



This can hardly be said of monotheism, the next step in the evolu- 

 tion of religion. For there has been and in some quarters still is a 

 great divergence of opinion regarding its historic origin. For until 

 within a few generations, it was the common belief of thinkers on the 

 subject of religion that the knowledge of the existence of one god was 

 a primitive revelation, made to the first representatives of the human 

 race, and handed down by them to their posterity. Polytheism and all 

 other forms of religion, it was maintained, are a degeneration from a 

 once higher form. But this view has few if any advocates among 

 recent scholars. For it is now known that the tendency to the mono- 

 theistic position exists among all people when they have advanced to a 

 certain degree of mental culture. As Jastrow well says : 



There is a difference in the degree in which this tendency is emphasized, 

 but whether we turn to Babylonia, Egypt, India, China or Greece, there are 

 distinct traces towards concentrating the varied manifestations of divine 

 powers in a single source. 



This tendency is a perfectly natural one, and arises the moment 

 man begins seriously to reflect upon the universe. He can not fail to 

 observe the inequalities that exist among the deities, and to realize that 

 of necessity one must be supreme to all the others. When any two 

 peoples united as the result of war or for any other reason, the superior 

 place would naturally be accorded to the deity of the conquering 

 power; and as a nation grew in influence and became conscious of its 

 strength, it would gradually change its opinions regarding the gods of 

 the nations about it. It would either do as the Greeks did in the case 

 of Ammon, the god of the Egyptians, recognize in him their own Zeus 

 as appearing in another form, or come to treat other gods as inferior 

 deities not worthy of being compared with their own god, as the He- 

 brew looked upon Chemosh, the supreme god of the Moabites, in com- 

 parison with Jahveh, or Jehovah, their own national deity. 



It is a matter of history that monotheism did not originate in any 

 one quarter alone, but was an idea attained independently by many 

 people at a comparatively early stage in their development. 



The chief contribution of the Hebrews to religion is not their mono- 

 theistic idea, but the emphasis they put upon the ethical character of 

 their supreme deity. He was not mere power that goes stalking 



