Polytheism to Monotheism.

It cannot be doubted that this transition took place very tardily. The
conception of a unity in Nature, which would admit of attributing it to
a single will, is far from being natural to man, and only finds
admittance after a long period of discipline and preparation, the
obvious appearances all pointing to the idea of a government by many
conflicting principles. We know how high a degree both of material
civilization and of moral and intellectual development preceded the
conversion of the leading populations of the world to the belief in one
God. The superficial observations by which Christian travellers have
persuaded themselves that they found their own Monotheistic belief in
some tribes of savages, have always been contradicted by more accurate
knowledge: those who have read, for instance, Mr Kohl's Kitchigami, know
what to think of the Great Spirit of the American Indians, who belongs
to a well-defined system of Polytheism, interspersed with large remains
of an original Fetichism. We have no wish to dispute the matter with
those who believe that Monotheism was the primitive religion,
transmitted to our race from its first parents in uninterrupted
tradition. By their own acknowledgment, the tradition was lost by all
the nations of the world except a small and peculiar people, in whom it
was miraculously kept alive, but who were themselves continually lapsing
from it, and in all the earlier parts of their history did not hold it
at all in its full meaning, but admitted the real existence of other
gods, though believing their own to be the most powerful, and to be the
Creator of the world. A greater proof of the unnaturalness of Monotheism
to the human mind before a certain period in its development, could not
well be required. The highest form of Monotheism, Christianity, has
persisted to the present time in giving partial satisfaction to the
mental dispositions that lead to Polytheism, by admitting into its