History of Religious Evolution 719 



As mankind advanced in purely mental knowledge or cogit- 

 ism of the universe, as he observed the workings of his own 

 and his neighbors' minds, in their moral relations or higher 

 cogitism; above all, as the different agencies of the world and 

 of the universe were recognized to center round or be influ- 

 enced by the Sun, the characters and the spiritic personalities 

 of his deities became slowly but surely subsidiary to this one 

 great luminary. 



Not only so, when it was more and more realized by long- 

 continued annual observation and record, on the part of the 

 wisest and most aspiring minds, that the activities or qualities 

 associated we will say with Ceres, with Saturn, with Pales, 

 or with Ops, of the Roman pantheon, seemed in turn to be 

 determined by and to originate from the Sun, the latter be- 

 came the primal Source, Power, and Personality that guided 

 the actions or even determined the existence of the others. 

 Therefore in the progress of all the ancient and civilized na- 

 tions a point was reached where polytheism failed to satisfy. 

 For, by combining all the cogitic and spiritic stimuli that 

 came to him, man united these into a resultant response that 

 directed him to view the sun as the all-mighty Energy, Agency, 

 and Personality of the universe. 



Conducing to this result were the manifest facts that, as 

 it rose in the skies from the spring to the summer solstice, 

 an ever increasing heat, light, growth, and fertility radiated 

 from it to the earth. When it sank daily in the west all nature 

 became hushed or inert, except for a few animals that seemed 

 alone to resist or overcome its somnolent action, and which 

 thereby took on a sacred character in some religious systems, 

 as, for example, the Egyptian. When storms raged and storm 

 clouds drifted threateningly across the sky, these latter to 

 many seemed the garments of the Sun-god that he was wrap- 

 ping around himself in anger, while he hid his face. 



These and many other environal stimuli so impressed man 

 that, in summating them into a resultant whole, the mental 

 response was a great reverential and loving, though at times 

 also awed, feeling for the powerful, yet distant and intangible. 



