protector; or the good genius of some human or social activity, such as is the god who presides over husbandry, war, or navigation, or the homely household god of the hearth and the "cooking furnace." Here the insistent need invents and objectifies its own fulfillment.
All three notions of deity may be united in a local tribal deity, "who on the one hand has fixed relations to a race of men, and on the other hand has fixed relations to a definite sphere of nature," so that "the worshiper is brought into stated and permanent alliance with certain parts of his material environment which are not subject to his will and control."[1]
THE IDEA OF A SUPREME DEITY
There is one further notion of deity that demands recognition in this brief summary, the notion, namely, of the supreme deity. As men develop in intelligence, imagination, and in range of social intercourse, it is inevitable that one god should be exalted above all others, or worshiped to the exclusion of all others. Such a religious conception arises from the experience of the unity of nature or of the unity of man. There is an evident hierarchy among the powers of nature; some are subordinated to others, and it is natural to conceive of one as supreme. Most evident to sense is the exultation of the heavens above the earth and the intermediate spaces. So we find Heaven to be supreme God among the Chinese, and Zeus among the Greeks. On the other hand, there is a hierarchy among tutelary and ancestral gods. As the patron gods of individuals, of special arts, or of tribes and provinces are subordinated to the national god, so the national god in turn is subjected to the god of a conquering nation. Allied with the idea of universal conquest is the idea of an all-dominant god, the god of the ruling class. Or a tutelary god may be universal in proportion to the universality of the activity over which he presides. The gods of the same activity though belonging originally to different cults may come to be identified; so that there arises the conception of a god that shall be universal in the sense of presiding over the common undertaking in which all men are engaged. And similarly the god from whom all men are descended will take precedence of the gods of families,
- ↑ W. Robertson Smith: "Religion of the Semites," p. 124.
