Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 6, 2025
The spirits of fetichism, according to Höffding, become eventually the gods of polytheism: such a spirit, so long as it is a fetich, is "the god of a moment," and must come to be permanent if it is to attain to the ranks of the polytheistic gods. But fetiches, even when their function becomes permanent, remain fetiches and do not become gods.
All important affairs of life transacted under superintendence of Supreme Powers. 14. What are these Powers? Three principles regarding them. 15. The Jews. 16. Roman Catholicism really polytheistic, although believers won't admit it. Virgin Mary. Saints. Angels. Protestantism in the same condition in a less degree. 17. Francis of Assisi. Gradually made into a god. 18.
The types which were first fetishes and then polytheistic were transformed into the physical and intellectual principles of the world, divested of all mythical and extrinsic form as far as their material organization was concerned.
There was no more need of teaching him that his God was the only God, than that Eve was the only woman. With Noah the case is not so plain. He doubtless worshipped God amid the surroundings of polytheistic heathenism. Enoch probably had a similar environment, and there is no good reason for supposing that their monotheism may not have been as exclusive as that of Abraham.
As a matter of fact, it is only to monotheism that intolerance is essential; an only god is by his nature a jealous god, who can allow no other god to exist. Polytheistic gods, on the other hand, are naturally tolerant; they live and let live; their own colleagues are the chief objects of their sufferance, as being gods of the same religion.
Of course a polytheistic and image-worshipping people, who observed a great many holy days, but no Sabbaths, could have nothing analogous to the first or the second and the fourth commandments of the Decalogue; but answering to the third, is "I have not blasphemed;" to the fifth, "I have not reviled the face of the king or my father;" to the sixth, "I have not murdered;" to the seventh, "I have not committed adultery;" to the eighth, "I have not stolen," "I have not done fraud to man;" to the ninth, "I have not told falsehoods in the tribunal of truth," and, further, "I have not calumniated the slave to his master."
I soon convinced myself that popular Catholicism, as it exists in southern Europe and as it has existed through a long course of centuries, is as literally polytheistic and idolatrous as any form of paganism, though it has many beauties, and though much of its very mingled influence has been for good.
Through a development of many centuries the popular religion from polytheistic became monotheistic, and from worshiping the sun and fire came to worship an embodiment of righteousness and of supreme power. An ideal of character grew up in close association with religious worship and ceremonial in which the central virtues were justice, benevolence, and chastity.
It may be that Moses profited by the opportunities afforded him of access to what was best in Egyptian society to become acquainted, not only with its advanced ethical and legal code, but with the more or less pantheistic unification of the Divine to which the speculations of the Egyptian thinkers, like those of all polytheistic philosophers, from Polynesia to Greece, tend; if indeed the theology of the period of the nineteenth dynasty was not, as some Egyptologists think, a modification of an earlier, more distinctly monotheistic doctrine of a long antecedent age.
It satisfied or stimulated the affections by its exaltation of the Virgin Mary as a supreme object of worship; it nourished the imagination on polytheistic legends of saints and martyrs; it stirred the religious emotions by touching and impressive rites; it surrounded its members with emblems of a special and invincible protection.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking