’By a prophet like Isaiah the residence of Jehovah in Zion is almost wholly dematerialised....  Conceiving Jehovah as the King of Israel, he necessarily conceives His kingly activity as going forth from the capital of the nation.’[11]

But nomad hunter tribes, with no ancestor-worship, no king and no capital, cannot lower their deity by the conditions, or limit him by the limitations, of an earthly monarchy.

In precisely the same way, Major Ellis proves the degeneration of deity in Africa, so far as being localised in place of being the Universal God, implies degeneration, as it certainly does to our minds.  By being attached to a given hill or river ’the gods, instead of being regarded as being interested in the whole of mankind, would eventually come to be regarded as being interested in separate tribes or nations alone.’

To us Milton seems nobly Chauvinistic when he talks of what God has done by ‘His English.’  But this localised and essentially degenerate conception was inevitable, as soon as, in advancing civilisation, the god who had been ‘interested in the whole of [known] mankind’ was settled on a hill, river, or lagoon, amidst a nation of worshippers.

In the course of the education of mankind, this form of degeneration (abstractly so considered) was to work, as nothing else could have worked, towards the lofty conception of universal Deity.  For that conception was only brought into practical religion (as apart from philosophic speculation) by the union between Israel and the God of Sinai and Zion.  The Prophets, recognising in the God of Sinai, their nation’s God—­One to whom righteousness was infinitely dearer than even his Chosen People—­freed the conception of God from local ties, and made it overspread the world.

Mr. Robertson Smith has pointed out, again, the manner in which the different political development of East and West affected the religion of Greece and of the Semites.  In Greece, monarchy fell, at an early period, before the aristocratic houses.  The result was ’a divine aristocracy of many gods, only modified by a weak reminiscence of the old kingship in the not very effective sovereignty’ (or prytany) ’of Zeus.  In the East the national god tended to acquire a really monarchic sway.’[12] Australia escaped polytheistic degeneracy by having no aristocracy, as in Polynesia, where aristocracy, as in early Greece, had developed polytheism.  Ghosts and spirits the Australians knew, but not polytheistic gods, nor departmental deities, as of war, agriculture, art.  The savage had no agriculture, and his social condition was not departmental.  In yet another way, political advance produces religious degeneration, if polytheism be degeneration from the conception of one relatively supreme moral being.  To make a nation, several tribes must unite.  Each has its god, and the nation is apt to receive them all, equally, into its Pantheon.  Thus, if worshippers of Baiame, Pundjel, and Darumulun coalesced into a nation, we might find all three gods living together in a new polytheism.  In fact, granting a relatively pure starting-point, degeneration from it must accompany every step of civilisation, to a certain distance.