“I know no such thing,” replied Mr. Merton, “and St. Paul, who was a good philosopher as well as an inspired apostle, tells us that men left the true God to worship creeping things and four-footed beasts. The monotheism you speak of is historically older than the fetichism of which you would make it a development. What you are pleased to call the monotheism of Moses, was older than that lawgiver. Moses, under Divine inspiration and direction, founded the Jewish state, or commonwealth, and instituted the Jewish worship, but he did not introduce a new faith or theology. The faith or doctrine he taught concerning God and moral duty, was that of the old patriarchs, and the same which had been held from Adam. Christian faith and theology have come down to us through the line of the patriarchs and the Jews, not through that of the Gentiles, and, if a development at all, is not a development of heathenism, but of the earlier patriarchal religion preserved in the synagogue. Hence St. Augustine says, that faith has not changed; as believed the fathers, so we believe—only they believed in a Christ who was to come, and we believe in a Christ who has come. “Then, again, the monotheism, if monotheism it was, of Socrates and Plato, was not a development or gradual purification of fetichism or of the gross forms of nature-worship. They themselves tell you as much, and always claim to be restorers, not innovators. In asserting the unity of God, they profess always to revive the belief or the wisdom of the ancients. No one can have studied the various forms of heathenism without finding in them ample evidence that they are not primitive formations. They all bear witness to a type which is not in themselves—a type from which they have departed, not a type which they are approaching or realizing. They bear the deep traces of corruption, and are evidently travesties of the old patriarchal or primitive religion, without a knowledge of which they are absolutely inexplicable. The memory of the loss of its primitive perfection, all heathenism retains in its heart. All heathenism is imprinted with profound grief for a lost good, and never does it show signs of a true joy. There is sadness in all its rites, gay and joyous as it tries to make them. Its joy is a drunken joy, and its boisterous mirth is the wild laugh of the maniac. But over the whole of heathenism, even in its grossest forms, there hovers always the primitive monotheism. It retains always some reminiscence of the belief in one supreme God, Father of gods and men. Anaxagoras, Socrates, Plato, and others, acquainted with the Jewish belief, and meditating on this reminiscence, undoubtedly rose to sublimer and more rational views of the Divinity than those which were entertained by the vulgar; but this says nothing in favor of that gradual development and purification of heathenism, which you and a well known modern school assert, and assert without one single fact to support you.