To put the question in this form is to leave entirely out of consideration the objective reality or otherwise of the idea itself. To analyse the origin of a concept is not to attack the validity of the belief it encloses. The idea of gravitation, for example, arose by slow degrees in human minds, and reached at last its final expression in Newton’s law. But to trace the steps by which that idea was gradually reached is not in any way to disprove or to discredit it. The Christian believer may similarly hold that men arrived by natural stages at the knowledge of the one true God; he is not bound to reject the final conception as false merely because of the steps by which it was slowly evolved. A creative God, it is true, might prefer to make a sudden revelation of himself to some chosen body of men; but an evolutionary God, we may well believe, might prefer in his inscrutable wisdom to reveal his own existence and qualities to his creatures by means of the same slow and tentative intellectual gropings as those by which he revealed to them the physical truths of nature. I wish my enquiry, therefore, to be regarded, not as destructive, but as reconstructive. It only attempts to recover and follow out the various planes in the evolution of the idea of God, rather than to cast doubt upon the truth of the evolved concept. In{003} investigating any abstruse and difficult subject, it is often best to proceed from the known to the unknown, even although the unknown itself may happen to come first in the order of nature and of logical development. For this reason, it may be advisable to begin here with a brief preliminary examination of Christianity, which is not only the most familiar of all religions to us Christian nations, but also the best known in its origins: and then to show how far we may safely use it as a Standard of Reference in explaining the less obvious and certain features of earlier or collateral cults. Christianity, then, viewed as a religious standard, has this clear and undeniable advantage over almost every other known form of faith--that it quite frankly and confessedly sets out in its development with the worship of a particular Deified Man. This point in its history cannot, I think, be overrated in importance, because in that single indubitable central fact it gives us the key to much that is cardinal in all other religions; every one of which, as I hope hereafter to show, equally springs, directly or indirectly, from the worship of a single Deified Man, or of many Deified Men, more or less etherealised.