Professor Max Mueller speaks in a similar strain of the lapse of mankind from earlier and simpler types of faith to low and manifold superstitions:  “Whenever we can trace back a religion to its first beginning,” says the distinguished Oxford professor, “we find it free from many of the blemishes that offend us in its later phases.  The founders of the ancient religions of the world, as far as we can judge, were minds of a high stamp, full of noble aspirations, yearning for truth, devoted to the welfare of their neighbors, examples of purity and unselfishness.  What they desired to found upon earth was but seldom realized, and their sayings, if preserved in their original form, offered often a strange contrast to the practice of those who profess to be their disciples.  As soon as a religion is established, and more particularly when it has become the religion of a powerful state, the foreign and worldly elements encroach more and more on the original foundation, and human interests mar the simplicity and purity of the plan which the founder had conceived in his own heart and matured in his communings with his God."[131]

But in pursuing our subject we should clearly determine the real question before us.  How much may we expect to prove from the early history of the non-Christian systems?  Not certainly that all nations once received a knowledge of the Old Testament revelation, as some have claimed, nor that all races possessed at the beginning of their several historic periods one and the same monotheistic faith.  We cannot prove from non-scriptural sources that their varying monotheistic conceptions sprang from a common belief.  We cannot prove either the supernatural revelation which Professor Max Mueller emphatically rejects, nor the identity of the well-nigh universal henotheisms which he professes to believe.  We cannot prove that the worship of one God as supreme did not coexist with a sort of worship of inferior deities or ministering spirits.  Almost as a rule, the worship of ancestors, or spirits, or rulers, or the powers of nature, or even totems and fetishes has been rendered as subordinate to the worship of the one supreme deity who created and upholds all things.  Even the monotheism of Judaism and of Christianity has been attended with the belief in angels and the worship of intercessory saints, to say nothing of the many superstitions which prevail among the more ignorant classes.  We shall only attempt to show that monotheism, in the sense of worshipping one God as supreme, is found in nearly all the early teachings of the world.  That these crude faiths are one in the origin is only presumable, if we leave the testimony of the Bible out of the account.

When on a summer afternoon we see great shafts of light arising and spreading fan-shaped from behind a cloud which lies along the western horizon, we have a strong presumption that they all spring from one great luminary toward which they converge, although that luminary is hidden from our view.  So tracing the convergence of heathen faiths with respect to one original monotheism, back to the point where the prehistoric obscurity begins, we may on the same principle say that all the evidence in the case, and it is not small, points toward a common origin for the early religious conceptions of mankind.