With much careful discrimination, Dr. William A.P.  Martin, of the Peking University, has said:  “It is customary with a certain school to represent religion as altogether the fruit of an intellectual process.  It had its birth, say they, in ignorance, is modified by every stage in the progress of knowledge, and expires when the light of philosophy reaches its noon-day.  The fetish gives place to a personification of the powers of nature, and this poetic pantheon is, in time, superseded by the high idea of unity in nature expressed by monotheism.  This theory has the merit of verisimilitude.  It indicates what might be the process if man were left to make his own religion; but it has the misfortune to be at variance with facts.  A wide survey of the history of civilized nations (and the history of others is beyond reach) shows that the actual process undergone by the human mind in its religious development is precisely opposite to that which this theory supposes; in a word, that man was not left to construct his own creed, but that his blundering logic has always been active in its attempts to corrupt and obscure a divine original.  The connection subsisting between the religious systems of ancient and distant countries presents many a problem difficult of solution.  Indeed, their mythologies and religious rites are generally so distinct as to admit the hypothesis of an independent origin; but the simplicity of their earliest beliefs exhibits an unmistakable resemblance, suggestive of a common source.

“China, India, Egypt, and Greece all agree in the monotheistic type of their early religion.  The Orphic hymns, long before the advent of the popular divinities, celebrated the Pantheos, the Universal God.  The odes compiled by Confucius testify to the early worship of Shangte, the Supreme Euler.  The Vedas speak of ’one unknown true Being, all-present, all-powerful; the Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer of the universe.’  And in Egypt, as late as the time of Plutarch, there were still vestiges of a monotheistic worship.  ‘The other Egyptians,’ he says, ’all made offerings at the tombs of the sacred beasts; but the inhabitants of the Thebaid stood alone in making no such offerings, not regarding as a god anything that can die, and acknowledging no god but one, whom they call Kneph, who had no birth, and can have no death.  Abraham, in his wanderings, found the God of his fathers known and honored in Salem, in Gerar, and in Memphis; while at a later day Jethro, in Midian, and Balaam, in Mesopotamia, were witnesses that the knowledge of Jehovah was not yet extinct in those countries.’"[130]