But do these names prove that the people who invented them had a clear and settled idea of the unity of the Deity? Do we not find among the Aryan nations that the same superlatives, the same names of Lord and King, of Master and Father, are used when the human mind is brought face to face with the Divine, and the human heart pours out in prayer and thanksgiving the feelings inspired by the presence of God? Brahman, in Sanskrit, meant originally Power, the same as El. It resisted for a long time the mythological contagion, but at last it yielded like all other names of God, and became the name of one God. By the first man who formed or fixed these names, Brahman, like El, and like every name of God, was meant, no doubt, as the best expression that could be found for the image reflected from the Creator upon the mind of the creature. But in none of these words can we see any decided proof that those who framed them had arrived at the clear perception of One God, and were thus secured against the danger of polytheism. Like Dyaus, like Indra, like Brahman, Baal and El and Moloch were names of God, but not yet of the One God. And we have only to follow the history of these Semitic names in order to see that, in spite of their superlative meaning, they proved no stronger bulwark against polytheism than the Latin Optimus Maximus. The very names which we saw explained before as meaning the Highest, the Lord, the Master, are represented in the Phenician mythology as standing to each other in the relation of Father and Son. (Renan, p. 60.) There is hardly one single Semitic tribe which did not at times forget the original meaning of the names by which they called on God. If the Jews had remembered the meaning of El, the Omnipotent, they could not have worshipped Baal, the Lord, as different from El. But as the Aryan tribes bartered the names of their gods, and were glad to add the worship of Zeus to that of Uranos, the worship of Apollon to that of Zeus, the worship of Hermes to that of Apollon, the Semitic nations likewise were ready to try the gods of their neighbours. If there had been in the Semitic race a truly monotheistic instinct, the history of those nations would become perfectly unintelligible. Nothing is more difficult to overcome than an instinct: naturam furcâ expellas, tamen usque recurret. But the history even of the Jews is made up of an almost uninterrupted series of relapses into polytheism. Let us admit, on the contrary, that God had in the beginning revealed Himself the same to the ancestors of the whole human race. Let us then observe the natural divergence of the languages of man, and consider the peculiar difficulties that had to be overcome in framing names for God, and the peculiar manner in which they were overcome in the Semitic and Aryan languages, and everything that follows will be intelligible. If we consider the abundance of synonymes into which all ancient languages burst out at their first starting--if we remember