Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/602

 292 The Origin of Monotheism.

look at the sects of our own time we find that the dis- tinction between them is deeper than points of dogma or ritual. You can almost tell what sect a man belongs to by his general outlook on Hfe, his politics, his tastes, his speech, and even his morality. But a man can scarcely support one fellow man, and fight another in the name of social standing, or manners, or artistic tendencies, so he takes points of dogma, as concrete symbols of elusive traditions and feelings. If we judge past ages by our own we may feel sure that even the quarrel ov^x homoiousios ■scaA homoousios involved much more than an iota.^

We might be quite sure then that the struggle between monotheism and polytheism was more than a philosophic disputation, even if our evidence did not furnish abundant hints to the contrary. It is significant that the mono- theistic party in Israel was the party of union, while the polytheistic party was for secession. " Jeroboam said in his heart, Now shall the kingdom return to the house of David : if this people go up to offer sacrifices in the house of the Lord at Jerusalem, then shall the heart of the people turn again unto their lord, even unto Rehoboam, King of Judah " (I. Kings xii. 26). The polytheists were for self-determination, the Monotheists for union. The attri- butes of Buddha are closely copied from those of a universal monarch ; in fact tradition declares that he had the option between becoming a supreme Buddha and a universal emperor, but he preferred to be a spiritual Lord of the world. The expansion of his creed was favoured by the greatest empire of ancient India. The Christian Church has a similar conception of its founder:

" And Kings sat still with awful eye. As if they surely knew their sovereign lord was nigh."

He was born at the very time when the most powerful empire of the ancient world had been consolidated, and

1 Gibbon, Decline and Fall, ii., p. 352 (Bury).