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Updated: May 6, 2025
Again, if such an opinion and such a method can give us the key to the polytheistic origin of the respective Olympuses of classic Greece and Rome, it leaves unexplained the numerous and manifold superstitions which philology itself proves to have existed prior to the origin of cosmic myths.
The history of theistic movements in civilized peoples shows that the effectiveness of a polytheistic system as a framework of religious life is in proportion to the extent of its anthropomorphization of deities, that is, it is in proportion to their humanization that gods enter into intimate association with human experiences.
Till men know they are sick, and recognize the deadly nature of their sickness, there will be no application to the Great Physician. In addition to the indurating effects of sin everywhere, the people of India have been for ages so drugged, I may say, with pantheistic and polytheistic teaching, that if man's moral nature had been destructible it must have been destroyed ages ago.
And if the polytheistic gods, which are to be found where fetishism is believed in, present us with a very low stage in the development of the idea of a 'perfect personality, so too the sort of miracles which are believed in, where the belief in magic flourishes, present us with a very low stage in the development of the idea of an almighty God.
Special and specific ideas were then arranged in a certain order, and those which are more general in a concentric and systematic classification; this had been also the case in the earlier polytheistic system, since the process of the intelligence naturally arranges all its representations. But he did not stop here, nor indeed was it possible for him to do so.
+349+. When chiefs and kings are divinized, offerings are usually made to them as to other gods; their cult becomes a part of the polytheistic system. But it is rare that they displace the old local deities or equal them in influence. Their worship passes with the passing of polytheism.
"Oh bless you! I have been polytheistic as any other well-read pagan of my day, and changed the heads and the labels of the fetiches on my altar almost as often as my ball wardrobe. I aspired to 'culture' in all the 'cults', and I improved diligently my opportunities.
It is true that he also developed polytheistic ideas and beliefs, and that he cultivated them at certain periods of his history with diligence, and to such a degree that the nations around, and even the stranger in his country, were misled by his actions, and described him as a polytheistic idolater.
But was it ever heard that polytheism tolerated a dissent from a polytheistic establishment, the belief of one God only? Never! never! Sir, they constantly carried on persecution against that doctrine. I will not give heathens the glory of a doctrine which I consider the best part of Christianity.
The theory which has hitherto been generally accepted by mythologists, even by those who profess Comte's great principle of historical evolution, is that man began with special fetishes, that these were combined in comprehensive types to form polytheistic hierarchies, and hence he rose by an analogous process to a more or less vague conception of monotheism.
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