we must rather look to the evidence of language and fact, records which may indeed be misread, but which cannot well be forged or falsified.  These will show us that in the earliest times the religious sentiment of the Phoenicians acknowledged only a single deity—­a single mighty power, which was supreme over the whole universe.  The names by which they designated him were El, “great;” Ram or Rimmon, “high;” Baal, “Lord;” Melek or Molech, “King;” Eliun, “Supreme;” Adonai, “My Lord;” Bel-samin, “Lord of Heaven,” and the like.[0116] Distinct deities could no more be intended by such names as these than by those under which God is spoken of in the Hebrew Scriptures, several of them identical with the Phoenician names—­El or Elohim, “great;” Jehovah, “existing;” Adonai, “my Lord;” Shaddai, “strong;” El Eliun,[0117] “the supreme Great One.”  How far the Phoenicians actually realised all that their names properly imply, whether they went so far as to divest God wholly of a material nature, whether they viewed Him as the Creator, as well as the Lord, of the world, are problems which it is impossible, with the means at present at our disposal, to solve.  But they certainly viewed Him as “the Lord of Heaven,"[0118] and, if so, no doubt also as the Lord of earth; they believed Him to be “supreme” or “the Most High;” and they realised his personal relation to each one of his worshippers, who were privileged severally to address Him as Adonai—­“my Lord.”  It may be presumed that at this early stage of the religion there was no idolatry; when One God alone is acknowledged and recognised, the feeling is naturally that expressed in the Egyptian hymn of praise—­“He is not graven in marble; He is not beheld; His abode is unknown; there is no building that can contain Him; unknown is his name in heaven; He doth not manifest his forms; vain are all representations."[0119]

But this happy state of things did not—­perhaps we may say, could not—­in the early condition of the human intelligence, last long.  Fallen man, left to himself, very soon corrupts his way upon the earth; his hands deal with wickedness; and, in a little while, “every imagination of the thoughts of his heart is only evil continually."[1110] When he becomes conscious to himself of sin, he ceases to be able to endure the thought of One Perfect Infinite Being, omnipotent, ever-present, who reads his heart, who is “about his path, and about his bed, and spies out all his ways."[1111] He instinctively catches at anything whereby he may be relieved from the intolerable burden of such a thought; and here the imperfection of language comes to his aid.  As he has found it impossible to express in any one word all that is contained in his idea of the Divine Being, he has been forced to give Him many names, each of them originally expressive of some one of that Being’s attributes.  But in course of time these words have lost their force—­their meaning has been forgotten—­and they have come to be mere proper names, designative