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Updated: May 6, 2025
The Hebrew Scriptures uniformly represent the non- idolatrous and monotheistic peoples, from Abraham to Cyrus, as lower in what we now call the scale of civilisation, than the idolatrous and polytheistic peoples about them.
The Jews scorned such idolatrous and polytheistic proceedings. For here again a great foreign religion came like water in the desert to minds reluctantly and superficially enlightened, but secretly longing for the old terrors and raptures from which they had been set free. 'Other nations despise the philosophy of Greece. It is so recent and so constantly changing.
For even at that early stage Mahomet, with the examples of Judaism and Christianity before him, must have rejected, even if unthinkingly, the polytheistic idea. The poetic and warlike contests partook of the fiery earnestness characteristic of the combatants, and it was seldom that the fair at Ocatz passed by without some hostile demonstration.
Buddhism has passed through the same modifications. Our great reformer, Sakya-Muni, inspired by the Supreme Judge, understood truly the one and indivisible Brahma, and forbade his disciples attempting to manufacture images in imaginary semblance of him. He had openly broken from the polytheistic Brahmins, and appreciated the purity, oneness and immortality of Brahma.
Moreover, when we place this and the similar stories we find in the early chapters of Genesis side by side with the Babylonian myths with which they stand in some sort of historical relationship, we can trace in the lofty moral and spiritual teachings of the former, as contrasted with the grotesque and polytheistic representations of the latter, the veritable action of the Spirit of God upon the minds of men.
But Abraham stood fast and showed forth extraordinary firmness—and God made this exile to be to His eternal honor—until He established the Unity of God in the midst of a polytheistic generation. This exile became the cause of the progress of the descendants of Abraham, and the Holy Land was given to them.
And Clytie's view that God called himself "Us" in the same sense that kings and editors of newspapers do at length prevailed over the polytheistic hypothesis of Cousin Bill J.
It is not surprising, then, that the new-comers soon fell into the ranks of purely evil spirits, and that those who persisted in exercising their rites were stigmatized as devil-worshippers, or magicians. But in process of time this polytheistic system became pre-eminently unsatisfactory to the thoughtful men whom Greece produced in such numbers.
But petitions may be put up, not only to polytheistic gods, or to fetishes, but even to the one god of the monotheist, which never should be put up. 'Of thy goodness, slay mine enemies, is, in form, prayer: it is a desire, a petition to a god, implying recognition of the superiority of the divine power, implying adoration even.
And though such conscious attempts at reconciliation of beliefs in many gods and in one Supreme were confined to a small minority of meditative priests and speculative philosophers, yet really, the combination was implicit in the sort of polytheistic religion which possessed the family affections and patriotic associations of the early Greek world.
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