As dreams are made on,
and to be ‘rounded with a sleep’ was the final consummation devoutly to be desired.
Monotheism developed itself later, partly from the feeling of the unity of nature forcing itself on the more philosophical minds; partly from that feeling of reverence and awe in presence of the Unknown which swallowed up other conceptions; and partly, in the earlier stages, from the feeling which exalted the local god of the tribe or nation, first into a supremacy over other gods, and finally into sole supremacy, degrading all other gods into the category of dumb idols made by human hands. In the Old Testament we can trace the development of this latter idea in its successive stages. Until the later days of the Jewish monarchy it is evident that the Jews never doubted the existence of other gods; and their allegiance oscillated between Jehovah and the heathen deities symbolised by the golden calf, worshipped in high places, and contending for the mastership in the rival sacrifices of Elijah and the priests of Baal. But the prophetic element gradually introduced higher ideas, and in the reigns of Hezekiah and Josiah the worship of Jehovah as the sole God became the religion of the State; and old legends and documents were re-edited in this sense in the sacred book, which was discovered and published for the first time in the reign of the latter king. The subsequent misfortunes of the nation, their captivity and contact with other religions in Babylonia, strengthened this monotheism into an ardent, passionate national faith, as it has continued to be with this remarkable people up to the present day. Christianity and Mahometanism, children of Judaism, have spread this form of faith over a great part of the civilised world; and of the three theories of polytheism, pantheism, and monotheism, it may be said that only the two latter survive.
Polytheism was bound to perish first, for slow as the advance of science was, the uniformity of most of the phenomena, which had been attributed to so many separate gods, could not fail to make an impression; and as ideas of morality came slowly and tardily to be evolved as an element of religion, the cruel rites and scandalous fables which so generally accompanied polytheistic religions became shocking to an awakening conscience.
It is worthy of remark that this element of morality, which has now gone so far towards swallowing up the others, was the latest to appear. Even in the Jewish conception Jehovah was for a long time just as often cruel, jealous, and capricious, as just and merciful; and St. Paul’s doctrine that because God had the power to do as He liked, He was warranted in creating a large portion of the human race as ‘vessels of wrath,’ predestined to eternal punishment, is as revolting to the modern conscience as any sacrifice to Beelzebub or Moloch. If we wish to see how little necessary connection there is between morality and monotheism, we have only to look at Mahometanism, which, in its extremer forms, may be called monotheism run mad.
The Wahabite reformer, we are told by Palgrave, preached that there were only two deadly sins: paying divine honours to any creature of Allah’s, and smoking tobacco; and that murder, adultery, and such like trivial matters, were minor offences which a merciful Allah would condone. He held also that of the whole inhabitants of the world all would surely be damned, except one out of the seventy-two sects of Mahometans, who held the true faith and dwelt in the district of Riad. This illustrates the insane extremes into which all human speculations run, if a single idea—in this case that of awe, reverence, and abject submission in presence of an almighty power—is allowed to run its course without check and obtain undue preponderance.
Apart from these extreme instances we may say that the two religious theories which have survived to the present day in the struggle for existence, are monotheism and pantheism. Pantheism is, in the main, the creed of half the human race—of the teeming millions of India, China, Japan, Ceylon, Thibet, Siam, and Burmah. How deeply it is rooted in their conceptions was very forcibly impressed on me in a conversation I had on board one of the P. and O. steamers with an English missionary returning from China. He told me how he had dined one evening with an intelligent Chinese merchant, and after dinner they walked in the garden discussing religious subjects, and he tried to impress on his host the first principles of the Christian religion. It was a starlight night, and for sole reply the Chinese gentleman stretched his hand to the heavens and said, ‘Do you mean to tell me all that is dead—do you take me for a fool?’ The Chinese ‘illative sense’ was as absolute in its conclusions for pantheism, as that of Cardinal Newman for theism. In fact pantheism, though not the whole truth, and almost as inconsistent as polytheism with the real facts of the universe as disclosed by science, has a certain poetical truth in it, to which chords of human emotion vibrate responsively, and is perhaps not so widely in error as some of the extreme theories which treat matter as something base and brutal. Wordsworth’s noble lines—
A sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,