As time passed, demons and gods gave way, in theory at least, to the sovereignty of one powerful deity who gathered to himself the powers and activities of the old multiplicity of agents whom man had worshipped and {112} placated. It is probable that this movement toward a consciously held monotheism reflected the changing political organization of society. The old chaos of superhuman agents, each doing what was right in his own eyes, gave way to a growing heavenly order in which one powerful agent exerted his suzerainty over minor principalities. Yet monotheism has always been relative, for the one god has his agents of subordinate rank--agents, powers and intercessors--just as the most absolute monarch has his ministers. Political imagination cannot go beyond its source. Christianity is usually regarded as the best type of monotheism; yet the early Church Fathers thought of the old gods as demons working their nefarious will upon man. It is notorious that many of the saints of the calendar are only re-christened pagan deities adopted by the Church to meet popular demands. The peasantry _would_ believe in the agency of local divinities whose reputation had been great for the healing of sickness, or the granting of children to the childless, or the causing of rain to fall in seasons of drouth; and the Church, wisely enough, controlled and adopted what it could not prevent. The old pluralism of agencies refused to give way more than formally to a single agent. The psychology of this resistance is simple enough. Just as the king is unable to give his personal attention to the requests of all his subjects but must delegate authority to officers to look after details, so the one deity cannot give ear and attention to the incessant cries of his myriads of creatures. I cannot help feeling that the pious catholic has more psychological realism in these matters than the protestant sectarian who wearies his deity with all sorts of trivial matters. Surely a {113} million petitions at the same time would distract any conceivable kind of personal deity! But, in the present chapter, we are not concerned so much with the problem of the number and inter-relations of the superhuman agents at work in the universe as with the idea of personal agency itself. The point I wish to call attention to is that the change from polytheism to monotheism did not involve any essential modification of the accepted notions of agency. Nature--and human life with it--was thought of as under the control of a superpersonal agent who guided the course of events in accordance with his purposes. An ethical refinement of the idea of deity had supervened which lifted it far above the crudities of the so-called nature-religions. Was this not because man and human society had evolved ethically and socially? But no marked break in the setting of the idea had arisen. And this fact presents the thinker with a problem.