of its meanness by being filled with the spirit of life, and in which the spirit of life is emancipated from its vagueness by being incorporated in the form of the fetich.

The whole subsequent history of religion is an accomplishment of this process a narration of those steps by which the spiritual life finds increasingly its embodiment in outward things. Perhaps the first stage is the spiritualising of the Fetich itself. The man takes the piece of wood and the piece of stone and carves them into a human image. When he has done this we give him for the first time the name of idolater. And yet,

nothing is more certain than that we have used the name in the wrong place and time. If it was applicable at all, it was to the earlier period. It is when the man reverences the unconscious Fetich believing it to be unconscious, that we ought really to call him an idolater. When he comes to form the Fetich into a likeness of himself, when he begins to carve the wood and stone into the image of the human, he has already in the deepest sense ceased to be an idolater. He is no more an idolater than the little girl is an idolater when she dresses and speaks to her doll; in fact the two cases are almost identical. The little girl speaks to her doll not as a doll but as something more. If she realised the fact that it was a doll, she could not speak to it. It is because she invests

it with her own girlhood, with her own prospective womanhood, that she is alone able to make it an object of communion. So is it with the childhood of man. He begins to dress in his own likeness the forms which he sees around him, and then he proceeds to commune with the image he has made. But it is essential to the very existence of such an intercourse that he should have ceased to view

It is essential

these forms merely as what they are. that he should see them transfigured into his own likeness, lit up by his own intelligence, permeated by his own spirit. It is essential that he should think of them as responsive and capable of responding to the aspirations of his human heart through the possession of a kindred nature and the sharing of a common life.

I do not think, however, that the childhood of the human race can long continue to rest in the adoration of these lower forms. It seems to me that, when man has once arrived at the notion of the glorification of spirit, he will naturally be most attracted to those objects which require least transfiguration. We have seen how in the earliest age he was drawn to the lower rather than to the higher objects of nature from the fact that he found the latter too like himself. That fact will now have the exactly opposite tendency; it will attract instead of repelling. He has come to find that the capacity for change is not a mark of perishableness

but of permanence. Accordingly, the things which he once avoided on account of their changefulness shall be precisely the things which he shall now most earnestly seek. The higher regions of nature shall be to him a more congenial sphere of worship than the monotonous materials from which he selected his Fetiches. He will go with most alacrity to the things most like himself, the things most allied to the movements of life. He will go to the sea, to the winds, to the rivers, to the stars,-to everything that exhibits motion and indicates continuance in change. His new Pantheon will be filled by the gods of the upper air, because in the gods of the upper air he shall find the objects nearest to his own being. He shall interpret their movements after the analogy of spirit, shall clothe them in the attributes of his human life, and shall reverence in them the vision of that profound mystery which he himself has found to be living within him.

It is a very barren subject of inquiry to ask whether at this stage of his religious history the man shall worship many gods or one. If I brought a company of children into a large room in which I had previously placed a variety of toys, what would be the effect of this variety? Would the children be attracted simultaneously to all, or would they fix their minds upon one and the same? Clearly, they would follow neither of these alternatives

They would neither be united in the admiration of the whole, nor would they be agreed in recognising the superior excellence of any single object; but each would fix his attention upon that particular thing which best suited his own ideal. One might be drawn to the image of a wooden horse, another to the imitation of a ship, a third to the similitude of a steam-engine. But the point for us to observe is that, whatever the object might be on which the attention of each child should be fastened, this object to that child would become, for the time, supreme. Whether it were horse or ship or steamengine that first attracted its admiration, the object of attraction would, for the instant, be the only object in its universe. It would hold sway to the exclusion of all others. The period of its reign. might be short-lived; it might last a few hours or it might expire in a few minutes; but during the time of its continuance it would rule alone and unrivalled. Every other form would vanish from the sphere of the child's observation. When it entered the room it would find many objects; but, the moment it had made its choice, it would see only one. It would regard the possessions of the other children with a species of contempt, and the other children themselves with a certain amount of pity. It would say of its own new-found idol, "There is none among the gods like unto thee."

Now all this is highly pertinent to the present

question. The children of the human race are exactly in the position of my hypothetical child. They are brought into a large room which has been already stored with a multitude of attractive things. These things are not equally attractive to all. Each child gravitates towards a different object -one to the sun, one to the moon, one to the stars, one to the rivers or winds or seas. But whatever the object of choice may be, it is, while it lasts, supreme. He who worships the winds worships them exclusively, sees in them the arbiters of all other things. It is another question altogether, how long that worship will last; the childhood of the race cannot, any more than the childhood of the individual, retain for a lengthened period one object in its admiration. To-morrow in all probability its allegiance will be transferred from the winds to the sun or to the river. The one point for us to observe is that during the time of its allegiance it recognises no other form but that which has first attracted it, admits into its worship no other object of adoration than that before which it has already bowed.

It

This is not Polytheism and it is not Monotheism; it is what Max Müller calls Henotheism.1 cannot be said to be either the recognition of many gods or the recognition of one; it is the recognition

1 Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as illustrated by the Religions of India, p. 285.