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Continuing his researches, the Martian notices a number of passages in the Old Testament that lead him to the conclusion that the Hebrews were originally polytheists. It becomes evident to him that the Hebrews, like their neighbors, worshiped "baalim" or the gods of the heathens.
The common people are indeed polytheists, at different seasons of the year and on different social occasions worshipping different deities, male or female, and setting out to this or that shrine, as the touts of the rival shrines have persuaded them.
Whatever men could doubt or deny they have doubted or denied, but in no country of the world, in no age, has the dogma there is something been denied or even treated as doubtful. Here then Universalists, Theists, and Polytheists agree. They agree of necessity.
Dogmatism is a religious profession of its own reality as contrasted with other systems; but Polytheists are liberals, and hold that one religion is as good as another. Yet the theological system was developing and strengthening, as well as the monastic rule, all the while the ritual was assimilating itself, as Protestants say, to the Paganism of former ages."
The Zuñi are polytheists; yet, while they have a plurality of gods, many of whom are the spirits of their ancestors, these gods are but mediums through which to reach their one great father of all the Sun. Returning to the house, the paternal grandmother again bathes the child in yucca suds; then, for the first time, the little one is put into the cradle.
In religion they were polytheists; they believed that, in the work of Creation, many Powers participated; that some of these Powers were benevolent, some malevolent, whilst others neither benevolent nor malevolent were merely neutral.
Hume anticipated the results of modern investigation in declaring fetishism and polytheism to be the form in which savage and ignorant men naturally clothe their ideas of the unknown influences which govern their destiny; and they are polytheists rather than monotheists because,
We have already seen how various, how loose, and how uncertain were the religious sentiments of Polytheists. They were abandoned, almost without control, to the natural workings of a superstitious fancy.
The only people who attained to toleration in the ancient world were the polytheists. The nations which practise toleration at the present time are those that might well be termed polytheistical, since, as in England and America, they are divided into innumerable sects. Under identical names they really adore very different deities.
Whence came the idea of Taa-roa? The Euhemeristic theory that he was a ghost of a dead man is absurd. But as we are now among polytheists it may be argued that, given a crowd of gods on the animistic model, an origin had to be found for them, and that origin was Taa-roa. This would be more plausible if we did not find Supreme Beings where there is no departmental polytheism to develop them out of.
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