149 
two masters ; sovereign power has not two directors. There is one God, and 
one Emperor. 
In which words it is idle to say that the Divine Being described 
is an impersonal, unintelligent essence. Language like this is 
indicative of a knowledge of true Monotheism, which, however it 
may have been gradually mixed up with pantheistic ideas, or 
subsequently lost in a host of idolatrous conceptions, is quite 
sufficient to prove that, in the sequence of religious beliefs, 
the higher was not evolved from the lower, but preceded and 
underlaid it, 
13. Let us now pass to ancient India. Speaking of the 
modern Hindoos, Sir J. Lubbock reminds us that they pay 
honour to almost every living creature. “ The cow, the ape, 
the eagle, and the serpent receive the highest honours ; but the 
tiger, elephant, horse, stag, sheep, hog, dog, cat, rat, peacock, 
chameleon, lizard, tortoise, fish, and even insects, have been 
made objects of worship.” All this is very true, and we might 
ourselves add very much more. It is a land of ultra-polytheistic 
degradation. Its gods are numbered by millions. It would 
have been more to the purpose of his own argument, however, 
if Sir John Lubbock had shown that, while the Fetichism, the 
Shamanism, and the idolatries of India had been growing 
during twenty centuries, the age preceding that period was one 
ot Atheistic belief or of total religious unconsciousness. That 
is the position which he has laid down^ as the natural origin of 
civilization, and he is bound in consistency to maintain it. 
14 . Yet nothing can be further from the truth. Moreover, 
it is a truth so universally known, that it seems incomprehen- 
sible to me how a man of Sir John Lubbock^s attainments 
could have refused to anticipate the rejoinder of his critics, and 
to say something at least upon the subject by way of self-justifi- 
cation. For every student of philosophy and ethnology is aware 
that, although the earliest Hindu worship was that of nature, 
yet it was not the sun, nor moon, nor fire, nor water, which 
were worshipped as things material, but only as the emblems or 
abodes of one Supreme Being, towards whom the hearts of all 
worshippers should be turned. 
The Polytheism of these Vedas, says Creuzer, is dissolved into Mono- 
theism.f 
The very vastness of the Hindoo mythology obliges it to be inconsistent. 
It is an effort to represent a Being who can only be grasped by an infinite 
# See the first page of this paper, 
t Quoted in Hunt’s Essay on Pantheism , p. 8, 
N 2 
