We have seen, above, the reason why fetishism becomes eventually distasteful to the common consciousness: the beings, superior to man, which are worshipped by the community, are worshipped as having the interests of the community in their charge, and as having the good of the community at heart; whereas a fetish is sought and found by the individual, to advance his private interests, even to the cost and loss of other individuals and of the community at large. Thus, from the earliest period at which beings, superior to man, are differentiated into gods and fetishes, gods are accepted by the common consciousness as beings who maintain the good of the community and punish those who infringe it; while fetishes become beings who assist individual members to infringe the customary morality of the tribe. Thus, from the first, the beings, of whom the community is conscious as superior to man, are beings, having in charge, first, the customary morality of the tribe; and, afterwards, the conscious morality of the community. This conception, it was, of the gods, as guardians of morality and of the common good, that condemned fetishism; and this conception it was, which was to prove eventually the condemnation of polytheism. A multitude of beings--even though they be divine beings--means a multitude, that is a diversity, of ideas. Diversity of ideas, difference of opinion, is what is implied by every mythology which tells of disputes and wars between the gods. Every god, who thus disputed and fought with other gods, must have felt that he had right on his side, or else have fought for the sake of fighting. Consequently the gods of polytheism are either destitute of morality, or divided in opinion as to what is right. In neither case, therefore, are the gods, of whom mythology tells, the beings, superior to man, who, from the beginning, were present in the common consciousness to be worshipped. From the outset, the object of the community's worship had been conceived as a moral power. If, then, the many gods of polytheism were either destitute or disregardful of morality, they could not be the moral power of which the common consciousness had been dimly aware: that moral power, that moral personality, must be other than they. As the moral consciousness of the community discriminated fetishes from gods and tended to rule out fetishes from the sphere of religion; so too, eventually, the moral consciousness of the community came to be offended by the incompatibility between the moral ideal and the conception of a multitude of gods at variance with each other. If the common consciousness was slow in coming to recognise the unity of the Godhead--and it was slower in some people than in others--the unity was logically implied, from the beginning, in the conception of a personal power, greater and higher than man, and having the good of the community at heart. The history of religion is, in effect, from one point of view, the story of the process by