Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/121

74 Again, it is said that traces of Monotheism are found even in the low stages of our religious history. This must necessarily follow from the identity of the human race; from the Sentiment and Idea of God, expressing themselves spontaneously. If Man is the same in all ages, differing only in degree of development, and this element is natural to him, then we must expect to find such expressions of it in the poets and philosophers; in the religion of India, Greece, and Rome. Men of the same spiritual elevation see everywhere the same spiritual truth. If this doctrine of Monotheism proceed from tradition alone, then it must be more clear and distinct as we approach the source of the tradition. But this is notoriously contrary to facts.

The opposite doctrine has no more of direct historical testimony in its favour; but is supported by many indirect testimonies: by the fact, that the greater part of the human race are still in the condition of Fetichism and Polytheism, and that the further we go back in history the worse is this state, and the ruder their religion. In the days of Herodotus, the proportion of rude and savage people was far greater than at this day. Even in that nation alleged to be most highly favoured, we find their social, moral, and religious condition is more rude the further we trace it back. They and other nations, at the time we first meet them in history, bordered close upon the Fetichistic state to which their mythology refers. No nation has ever been found in a normal state of religious culture.

If we reason only from established facts, we must conclude, that the hypothesis of a golden age, a garden of Eden, a perfect condition of man on the earth in ancient times, is purely gratuitous. The Kingdom of Heaven is not behind but before us. No one can determine, by historical evidence, what was the primitive state of the human race, or when, or where, or how mankind, at the command of God, came into existence. Here our conclusions can be only negative.