objects of worship. The supreme god of Greece is a monarch, father of gods and men, with very great powers, the head of moral order, the chief agent in providence. Some of the poets speak of him in terms truly sublime. There are passages in the Suppliants of JSschylus and in the Antigone of Sophocles which breathe the spirit of the Scriptures. But all that can be fairly drawn from such evidence is what Nacgelsbach draws from it in his Posthomerie Theology— that there was in the best age of Grecian authors a certain monothe- istic tendency which had no decisive control over Greek faith. " This tendency," to use his words, " was an al- most unconscious, a naive one, an obscure impulse, a light that shineth in darkness, but the darkness com- prehendeth it not." " The religious consciousness, on the one hand, so to speak, reduced the world of gods to Zeus, but on the other could not shake off the plurality of divine forms which nature first furnished to it." If there was any monotheism in the Greek religion it had its representative in Zeus. But what kind of a representative was he? He was not eternal, but born ; he was not a creator, for the Greek theology never em- braced a creation. He was not all-powerful, but was generally represented as controlled by fate. He had in the popular faith and mythology attributes most unlike those of a divine being. He was, in short, a monarch surrounded by gods of his own kindred, and very far from the conception of a holy or an absolute being. How could a holy and absolute being become so com- pletely changed in the faith of a nation as to lose not only his absolute character, but also what ought natu- rally to be fixed in the minds of men — his purity and holiness? We can conceive of men changing their gods, passing from one to many, or from many to one, but we cannot conceive of one and the same god as un- dergoing such utter transmutations. Still further it has been urged, with justice, that monotheism and polytheism rest on different bases. The first separates divinity from nature; the second identifies it with nature, and incorporates it in natural objects. The two are entirely different : how can the one slide into or retain characteristics of the other? This argument, however, does not derive its force from the oneness or manifoldness of the objects of worship, but from their essential relations to the world, so that a passing over from the worship of one not absolute god to that of more than one, also not absolute, is far from being in- credible. Hence, if we could accept ScheUing's view of the character of original monotheism, we could ad- mit of addition to or subtraction from the number of divinities. Nor can we maintain that traces of a primi- tive monotheism are certainly preserved in the religions of the other nations of antiquity. The earliest records of the Aryan race, as they appear in the Vedas, give us no indication that one god was of a higher class than the rest. Indra, as Prof. Whitney (Orient, and Litiff. Studies, p. 36) remarks, "stands at the head of the Vedic divinities. By this is not meant, however, that he is king among them, endowed with any author- ity over the rest : no such reduction to system of the religion had taken place as should establish a relation of this kind among its gods. They are as independent, each in his own domain, as the natural phenomena of which they are the personifications." And the further remark is made that the nature of Varuna's attributes and of his concern with the affairs of human life place him decidedly above Indra. Further, in the later stages of the Indian religions, a deity, comparatively subordinate, Vishnu, has reached a chief place, while the old gods have fallen more or less out of worship. The Iranian or Persian religion contains very exalted conceptions of its supreme divinity, Ormazd, or Ahura Mazda, i.e. the wise lord — called also Spentomainyus, or the holy-thinking one — the holy spirit, according to Spiegel, while Haug explains this name as denoting the white spirit. He is also a creator: and in many respects this religion stands very far above all others
POLYTHEISM
374
POLYTHEISM
ofthe same race. Bui ifOrraazd is a creator, Ahriman ramainyus), the bad spirit, is a creator also; and while there is an evident effort of philosophical n- flection nazd, who perhaps r
Varuna, above the- other mythological beings of the older faith such, for instance, as Mitbra -thi
i in attaining to the position of a pore
ism, i, hi is a dualism with decided remains of
polytheism. Once more the Bupreme divinity ofthe
/. us <<r Jupiter, i.e. Diov-pater,
i- now thought by the besl etymologists to answer i"
Dyaus-pita, a mythological c teption ol th
i as the father of Indra, but who either
dropped out of or never fully entered into the Vedic
system. If he dropped out, we find him re-
t.ii l by other portions of 1 1 •« - tndo-European race;
ii he had not entered into it. we find other members of the same family bringing forward this personality as their chief god. While the Greek and italic branches did ilii>. we find in Scandinavian mythology s answering, as Jacob Grimm (Deutsche MythoLch. be) Bhows, to /in ><r Zio, with a genitive Ziuwas <>r Ziewes, in Old High-German, and thus standing for the same Zeus or Jupiter. Il"\\ can we believe that