MAN. 107 
forth. And yet this faith in one God in the course of time 
degenerated into a worship of 33,000 divinities—until 
Gautama the Buddha evolved a system that denied the 
very existence of God. 
Turning to Greece we have the testimony of Prof. 
Max Mueller to this effect: “When we ascend to the 
distant heights of Greek history the idea of God, as the 
Supreme Being, stands before us as a simple fact.” 
(“Essays,”’ Il, p. 146.) Carl Boettcher, in his great work 
on the Treeworship of the Greeks, maintains: ‘As far 
as the legends of the Greeks can be traced into prehistoric 
ages, the entire nation worshipped a single God, nameless, 
without statues, without a temple, invisible and omnipres- 
ent.” This he regards as a tradition of “irrefutable in- 
ner truthfulness. ... The beginning of Polytheism 
therefore represents the second phase of Greek religion, 
which was preceded by a Monotheism.”’ Every student 
of Greek literature knows that this original belief at an 
early age gave place to a worship of the gods on Olympus, 
a worship which in turn gave way to openly avowed athe- 
ism. The Greeks were aware of this decay. Plato, in 
his Phaidros (274 B) quotes Socrates as saying: “I 
know of an old saying, that our ancestors knew what 
constituted the true worship of God; if we could but dis- 
cover what it was, would we then have need of human the- 
ories and opinions on the matter?’ Certainly a startling 
statement from the lips of a pagan. Undoubtedly Welcker 
was right when he asserted, as the ultimate result of his 
researches: “This (Greek) polytheism has settled before 
the eyes of men like a high and continuous mountain range, 
beyond which it is the privilege only of general historical 
study to recognize, as from a higher point of view, the 
natural primitive monotheism.” Concerning the mono- 
theistic ideas of later Greek thought, the same author says 
that they are to be regarded not as a result of an ascend- 
