Local gods are essentially competitive, active in a defined sphere. They are, by definition, many. Their very nature is to conflict one with another. There is no mental process whereby they can coalesce into a totally different kind of being. Far from it. They should, in the nature of things, and they do in actual historical example, degrade yet further, until they fall of their own insufficiency; but they don’t turn into the one Universal God. There is no case of it in all History.
One body of Men—the ancient Jews—did indeed say that their God was the only true God and the Universal God. But they were unique in this, and they didn’t begin by imagining many Gods. The whole point of their peculiarity was their affirmation of unity. That was what separated them from all other religions around them. The worshippers of local gods mocked this Jewish Jehovah (as on the Moabite Stone), but they never called their gods universal.
More than that we cannot say, and we do not know. The beginnings of the race are hidden from us, so far as scientific examination is concerned, save for certain analogies. There is no record of a contemporary sort, there is no direct archæological evidence. But such analogy as there is, and such examination of mental processes as is possible, leave the old anti-Christian theories—sun-myth and sexual and animistic and somniac—wrecked; and none more derelict than the unpleasant “Old Man.”
So much for that one, and much the most important, point.
If anyone would support the contention that man had not in him the idea of God, nor came to fulfil it, but acquired it as an illusion from circumstance, he must make up some better theory than this. It is even stupider than those still older exploded attempts which Mr. Wells has wisely left alone. After all, there is such a thing as the sun, and there are such things as dreams: and children, and all people with vivid imaginations, and in a healthy spiritual state, feel separate spiritual forces behind the world which well might be erroneously deified. But the “Old Man” is fictitious altogether. He is as unreal as Santa Claus; but we lose him with less regret.
CHAPTER V
WHENCE CAME RELIGION TO MAN?
What has Mr. Wells to say on the origin of religion in matters less than, but connected with, the Idea of God; for instance, Sacrifice, Worship, the Future Life? I leave Priesthood to a later discussion, in the place where Mr. Wells himself deals with it.
I take for my text a sentence drawn from his own work, page 67:
“Fetichism is only incorrect science based on guesswork or false analogy.”