Monotheism is older than polytheism, for polytheism, as the author himself seems to hold, grows out of pantheism, and pantheism evidently grows out of theism, out of the loss or perversion of the idea of creation, or of the relation between the creator and the creature, or cause and effect, and is and can be found only among a people who have once believed in one God, creator of heaven and earth and all things visible and invisible. Moreover, the earliest forms of the heathen superstitions are, so far as historical evidence goes, the least gross, the least corrupt. The religion of the early Romans was pure in comparison with what it subsequently became, especially after the Etruscan domination or influence. The Homeric poems show a religion less corrupt than that defended by Aristophanes. The earliest of the Vedas, or sacred books of the Hindoos, are free from the grosser superstitions of the latest, and were written, the author very justly thinks, before those grosser forms were introduced. This is very remarkable, if we are to assume that the grossest forms of superstition are the earliest! But we have with Greeks, Egyptians, Indians, no books that are of earlier date than the books of Moses, at least none that can be proved to have been written earlier; and in the books of Moses, in whatever light or character we take them, there is shown a religion older than any of the heathen mythologies, and absolutely free from every form of superstition, what is called the patriarchal religion, and which is substantially the Jewish and Christian religion. The earliest notices we have of idolatries and superstitions are taken from these books, the oldest extant, at least none older are known. If these books are regarded as historical documents, then what we Christians hold to be the true religion has obtained with a portion of the race from the creation of man, and, for a long series of years, from the creation to Nimrod, the mighty hunter or conqueror, was the only religion known; and your fetichisms, polytheisms, pantheisms, idolatries, and superstitions, which you note among the heathen, instead of being the religion of the infancy of the race, are, comparatively speaking, only recent innovations. If their authenticity as historical documents be denied, they still, since their antiquity is undeniable, prove the patriarchal religion obtained at an earlier date than it can be proved that any of the heathen mythologies existed. It is certain, then, that the patriarchal, we may say, the Christian religion, is the earliest known religion of the race, and therefore that fetichism, as contended by the positivists and the professor after them, cannot be asserted to have been the religion of the human race in the earliest stage of its existence, nor the germ from which all the various religions or superstitions of the world have been developed. {163}