Page:Logic Taught by Love.djvu/197

 may be the faults of the Jewish people, a question which need not be here discussed, they have brought down to us from some remote civilization a tradition of enormous value:—

The vital conviction which, during thousands of years, at all times pressed upon the Israelites, was that they were a "chosen people" selected out of all the multitudes of the earth to perpetuate the great truth that there was but one God—an illimitable, omnipotent, paternal spirit who rewarded the good and punished the wicked—in contradistinction from the multifarious subordinate animal and bestial demi-gods of the other nations of the earth. This sublime monotheism could only have been the outgrowth of a high civilization, for man's first religion is necessarily a worship of "stocks and stones," and history teaches us that the gods decrease in number as man increases in intelligence. It was probably in Atlantis that monotheism was first preached. The proverbs of "Ptah-hotep," the oldest book of the Egyptians, show that this most ancient colony from Atlantis received the pure faith from the motherland at the very dawn of history: this book preached the doctrine of one God, "the rewarder of the good and the punisher of the wicked." (Reginald S. Poole, Contemporary Review, Aug., 1 88 1, p. 38.) "In the early days the Egyptians worshipped one only God, the maker of all things, without beginning and without end. To the last the priests preserved this doctrine and taught