as having been applied to the aborigines of Australia, cites one of Sir Hercules Robinson’s Reports on New South Wales, which contains this description of the singular faith of one of the lowest of the interior tribes:[148] First a being is mentioned who is supreme and whose name signifies the “maker or cutter-out,” and who is therefore worshipped as the great author of all things.  But as this supreme god is supposed to be inscrutable and far removed, a second deity is named, who is the revealer of the first and his mediator in all the affairs of men.[149]

Rev. A.C.  Good, now a missionary among the cannibal tribes of West Africa, stated in the Presbyterian General Assembly at Saratoga in May, 1890, that with all the fetishes and superstitions known among the tribes on the Ogovie, if a man is asked who made him, he points to the sky and utters the name of an unknown being who created all things.[150] When Tschoop, the stalwart Mohican chief, came to the Moravians to ask that a missionary might be sent to his people, he said:  “Do not send us a man to tell us that there is a God—­we all know that; or that we are sinners—­we all know that; but send one to tell us about salvation."[151] Even Buddhism has not remained true to the atheism of its founder.  A Thibetan Lama said to Abbe Huc:  “You must not confound religious truths with the superstitions of the vulgar.  The Tartars prostrate themselves before whatever they see, but there is one only Sovereign of the universe, the creator of all things, alike without beginning and without end.”

But what is the testimony of the great dead religions of the past with respect to a primitive monotheism?  It is admitted that the later developments of the old Egyptian faith were polytheistic.  But it has generally been conceded that as we approach the earliest notices of that faith, monotheistic features more and more prevail.  This position is contested by Miss Amelia B. Edwards and others, who lean toward the development theory.  Miss Edwards declares that the earliest faith of Egypt was mere totemism, while on the other hand Ebrard, gathering up the results of the researches of Lepsius, Ebers, Brugsch, and Emanuel de Rouge, deduces what seem to be clear evidences of an early Egyptian monotheism.  He quotes Manetho, who declares that “for the first nine thousand years the god Ptah ruled alone; there was no other.”  According to inscriptions quoted by De Rouge, the Egyptians in the primitive period worshipped “the one being who truly lives, who has made all things, and who alone has not been made.”  This one God was known in different parts of Egypt under different names, which only in later times came to stand for distinct beings.  A text which belongs to a period fifteen hundred years before Moses says: