Professor Robert Flint, in his scholarly article on theism in “The Britannica,” seems to discard the idea that the first religion of mankind was monotheism; but a careful study of his position will show that he has in view those conceptions of monotheism which are common to us, or, as he expresses it, “monotheism in the ordinary or proper sense of the term,” “monotheism properly so called,” “monotheism which excludes polytheism,” etc.  Moreover, he maintains that we cannot, from historical sources, learn what conceptions men first had of God.  Even when speaking of the Old Testament record, he says:  “These chapters (of Genesis), although they plainly teach monotheism and represent the God whose words and acts are recorded in the Bible as no mere national God, but the only true God, they do not teach what is alone in the question—­that there was a primitive monotheism, a monotheism revealed and known from the beginning.  They give no warrant to the common assumption that God revealed monotheism to Adam, Noah, and others before the Flood, and that the traces of monotheistic beliefs and tendencies in heathendom are derivable from the tradition of this primitive and antediluvian monotheism.  The one true God is represented as making himself known by particular words and in particular ways to Adam, but is nowhere said to have taught him that He only was God.”  It is plain that Professor Flint is here dealing with a conception of monotheism which is exclusive of all other gods.  And his view is undoubtedly correct, so far as Adam was concerned.  There was no more need of teaching him that his God was the only God, than that Eve was the only woman.  With Noah the case is not so plain.  He doubtless worshipped God amid the surroundings of polytheistic heathenism.  Enoch probably had a similar environment, and there is no good reason for supposing that their monotheism may not have been as exclusive as that of Abraham.  But with respect to the Gentile nations, the dim traces of this monism or henotheism which Professor Flint seems to accord to Adam and to Noah, is all that we are contending for, and all that is necessary to the argument of this lecture.  We may even admit that heathen deities may sometimes have been called by different names while the one source of power was intended.  Different names seem to have been employed to represent different manifestations of the one God of the Old Testament according to His varied relations toward His people.  There are those who deny this polyonomy, as Max Mueller has called it, and who maintain that the names in the earliest Veda represented distinct deities; but, by similar reasoning, Professor Tiele and others insist that three different Hebrew Gods, according to their respective names, were worshipped in successive periods of the Jewish history.  It seems quite possible, therefore, that a too restrictive definition of monotheism may prove too much, by opening the way for a claim that even the Jewish and Christian faith, with its old Testament names of God, its angels, its theophanies, and its fully developed trinity, is not strictly monotheistic.  For our present purpose, traces of the worship of one supreme God—­call it monotheism or henotheism—­is all that is required.