738 ECCLESIASTICAL INSTITUTIONS. 



peculiar to it. Traces of this process we find in many places. 

 What we read of the Malagasy may be instanced as typical. 

 They have gods who belong &quot; respectively to different tribes or 

 divisions of the natives, and are supposed to be the guardians 

 and benefactors, or the titular gods, of these particular clans 

 or tribes. Four of these are considered superior to all 

 others&quot; are public or national gods. And Ellis adds that 

 the gods of one province have little weight or authority 

 with people of another province. As a case remote in time 

 may be named that of the ancient Egyptians. The nomes, 

 or original divisions of which Egypt was composed, were &quot; of 

 the highest antiquity &quot; : their limits being very exactly de 

 fined in inscriptions borne by the most ancient monumental 

 structures. &quot; Each district had a chief place where the 

 [hereditary] governor resided, and enjoyed the protection 

 and the cult of a special divinity, the sanctuary of which 

 formed the centre of the religious worship of the district.&quot; 

 That kindred evidence is furnished by accounts of other 

 ancient peoples needs no showing. Of course along with 

 this process goes the rise of priesthoods devoted some to 

 the local and some to the general cults, with consequent . 

 differences in dignity. Thus of Egyptian priests we read : 

 &quot; Some also, who were attached to the service of certain divinities, 

 held a rank far above the rest ; and the priests of the great gods were 

 looked upon with far greater consideration than those of the minor 

 deities. In many provinces and towns, those who belonged to parti 

 cular temples were in greater repute than others.&quot; 



A genesis of polytheism, and of polytheistic priesthoods, 

 equally important with, or perhaps more important than, the 

 foregoing, but frequently, as in the last case, scarcely distin 

 guishable from it, accompanies conquest. The over-runnings 

 of tribe by tribe and nation by nation, which have been 

 everywhere and always going on, have necessarily tended to 

 impose one cult upon another; each of them already in 

 most cases made composite by earlier processes of like kind. 

 Not destroying the worships of the conquered, the con 

 querors bring in their own worships either carrying them on 



