WRITING to the Corinthians, and with pertinent reference to the polytheism which shaped the religious thought and practice of their city and nation, Paul said: "To us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him." This spiritual monism was the fundamental statement of the Hebrew Scriptures, it was the basic teaching of Christ Jesus, and it is the insistent note of Christian Science. It gave the Jewish people one of their chiefest racial distinctions, and for the preservation of this sense of the oneness and all-inclusiveness of Deity the prophets were ever struggling. It was their first and final ground of appeal and defense, and as a result this merit must stand to the credit of the children of Israel, that they clung to the faith of their father Abraham with splendid tenacity, and bequeathed to humanity through their greatest prophet, Jesus of Nazareth, that concept of the unity and holiness of the divine nature which is the bulwark of Christianity.
While the thought of the world has been indisposed toward many features of the Jewish concept of God, it has always endorsed this concept, in its own recognition of what may be termed material monism, the unity of the ultimate fact and explanation of observed phenomena. The theory of evolution emphasizes the thought that, although so heterogeneous and diversified, all things and all events may be traced to a single source, while the whole drift of present-day scientific sense is toward the dawning possibility of demonstrating that the various elements which have been classified as distinct and unchangeable kinds of substance, are but varied conditions or movements of a single entity or force. Indeed, physical scientists are now finding an unfailing stimulus to research and experiment in the assurance that this can be accomplished, and in the hope that they may do it.
More than this, the most serious and unprejudiced thinkers among the non-religious find it extremely difficult to resist the universal instinct of mankind for unity, and this explains in part the hold which monism has upon philosophical speculation. The diversity and conflict of the so-called forces with which mortals have to do has never disturbed any man's conviction of his own unity or the unity of that which explains the universe. Indeed, the very multiplicity of these forces, together with their wonderful interrelations and actions, as they are disclosed in efforts of the laboratory to discover a governing law and order, no less than the inscrutable intelligence which ever and anon impressively breaks through the veil of material sense, serves to convince the scientific investigator with the necessity of positing one eternal ground and one unvarying law of being; and all this despite the dictum of the long-time conventional "good form" which has led so many scientists to rule the Christian's God out of their calculations.
