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"Then the polytheists likewise chose their man, one held among them in the highest esteem, well read and wise, a monk of monks. Between these two, then, the controversy commenced. As already agreed, the Nazarene was the first to question: "'How far is it from the Earth to the first heaven? "'Five hundred years. "'And thence to the second heaven? "'Five hundred years. "'Thence to the third?
"To any one who considers justly of the matter, it will appear that the gods of the polytheists are no better than the elves and fairies of our ancestors, and merit as little as any pious worship and veneration. These pretended religionists are really a kind of superstitious atheists, and acknowledge no being that corresponds to our idea of a Deity.
They follow, so far as modern circumstances permit, the ancient ritual and are apparent polytheists while accepting pantheism as the higher truth. Vishnuites and Sivaites however are monotheists in the sense that their minor deities are not essentially different from the saints of Roman and Eastern Christianity but their monotheism has a pantheistic tinge.
He there ascribes his conquest to 'Merodach, the great lord, and distinctly calls himself that god's 'worshipper. Like other polytheists, he had room in his pantheon for the gods of other nations, and admitted into it the deities of the conquered peoples.
That Divine Logos, and theology as a whole, receded further and further aloft into abysmal heights, as it became a mere dreary system of dead scientific terms, having no practical bearing on their hearts and lives; and then they, as the Neoplatonists had done before them, filled up the void by those daemonologies, images, base Fetish worships, which made the Mohammedan invaders regard them, and I believe justly, as polytheists and idolaters, base as the pagan Arabs of the desert.
'In the eighth century before Christ, he goes on to say, 'in the eighth century before Christ, in the heart of a world of idolatrous polytheists, the Hebrew prophets put forth a conception of religion which appears to me to be as wonderful an inspiration of genius as the art of Pheidias or the science of Aristotle.
Yet Trinitarian religions escape being polytheistic only by juggling with words, and if Hindus and Chinese are polytheists so are the Roman and Oriental Churches, for there is no real distinction between praying to the Madonna, Saints and Angels, and propitiating minor deities.
It becomes necessary, therefore, to remind ourselves that, though we see them to be untrue, they were not regarded as untrue by those who believed in them; and that many of them were not ignoble. Aeschylus and Sophocles are witnesses, not to be disbelieved, on these points. In their writings we have the reflections of polytheists upon the actions and attributes of the gods.
In any discussion regarding human responsibility the idea crops up that all is God, "There is One only, and no second." We can scarcely realise how readily it comes to the middle-class Hindu's lips that God is all, and that there can be no such thing as sin. The pantheists are thus no separate sect from the theists, any more than the theists are from the polytheists.
And this claim that the Jewish and the Persian religions were the same, that the Jews and the Persians were alike worshippers of the one true God, while all the surrounding nations were polytheists and idolaters, was admitted on the side of Persia. After his conquest of Babylon, Cyrus at once permitted the exiles to return to their own land.
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