Among the sublimer tenets of the druidical priesthood, we have every where apparent proofs of their polytheism: and the grossness of their religious ideas, as represented by some writers, is very inconsistent with that divine philosophy which has been considered as a part of their character.

Even Socrates, Plato, and Cicerothe most gifted men of classical antiquityhad very indefinite notions of the unity and personality of God, while Abram distinctly recognized this great truth even amid universal idolatry and a degrading polytheism.

All that I am trying to secure in these preliminary observations is a general idea of the Pantheistic view of the Universe as distinguished from that of Polytheism, Monotheism, or Atheism.

Meantime, to deprecate adverse prejudice, I may suggest that a careful study of the most ancient forms of Pantheism seems to show that they were purely philosophical; an endeavour to reach in thought the ultimate reality which polytheism travestied, and which the senses disguised.

[Sidenote: Evolved from Polytheism] Before considering the classical and Neo-platonic Greek speculations commonly regarded as Pantheistic, we may do well to recall to mind the immense difference between the established habit of theological thought in our day, and the vague, or at best, poetically vivid ideas of the ancients.

But it was not the Hebrew or Christian idea that was occasionally propounded; for in the ethnic mind it was rarely, if ever, regarded as inconsistent with polytheism; and consequently it verged on Pantheism.

From such a view of polytheism it is easy to understand how most, if not all, of the old speculative philosophers could allow the existence of the traditional gods, even while in reasoned contemplation they saw that all deities were subordinate to and merged in one universal God.

With the separation into nations polytheism arises.

This is partly simultaneous polytheism (a plurality of gods under a chief god), partly successive polytheism (an actual plurality of divinities, changing dynasties of several chief gods), and develops from star worship or Sabeism up to the religion of the Greeks.

This is partly simultaneous polytheism (a plurality of gods under a chief god), partly successive polytheism (an actual plurality of divinities, changing dynasties of several chief gods), and develops from star worship or Sabeism up to the religion of the Greeks.

Three stages are to be distinguished in the development of religion, according as the world is represented as an unordered unity (chaos), or as an indeterminate manifold of forces and elements (plurality without unity), or, finally, as an organized plurality dominated by unity (system)fetichism with fatalism, polytheism, mono- (including pan-) theism.

"Does he mean that theism is capable of nothing else than of being opposed to polytheism or atheism?"Dr.

"Is it meant that theism is capable of nothing else than of being opposed to polytheism or atheism?"L. Murray cor.

Out of this newborn ardor grew two important poems, The Gods of Greece and The Artists; the former an elegy on the decay of Greek polytheism conceived as a loss of beauty to the world, the latter a philosophic retrospect of human history wherein the evolutionary function of art is glorified.

Fechner, with his distinct earth-soul functioning as our guardian angel, seems to me clearly polytheistic; but the word 'polytheism' usually gives offence, so perhaps it is better not to use it.

We trace it from old barbarism to the methodized Egyptian idolatry; to the more flexible Polytheism of Syria and Greece; the poetical Pantheism of philosophers, and the moral monotheism of a few sages.

The latter was a polytheism brought close to the people through the Druids.

Egypt was the land of a religion which had won a high conception of the Divine unity; a religion which was scientific in its forms of thought, and earnestly moral in its spirit; but which failed to keep distinct in mind the order of nature from the Being on whom it reposes, and thus sank into the dreamy pantheism of its cultured classes, and the poetic polytheisms of its people.

God cannot be a reflection from human kings where there have been no kings; nor a president elected out of a polytheistic society of gods where there is as yet no polytheism; nor an ideal first ancestor where men do not worship their ancestors; while, again, the spirit of a man who died, real or ideal, does not answer to a common savage conception of the Creator.

The remarks of Waitz may be cited in full: 'The religion of the negro may be considered by some as a particularly rude form of polytheism and may be branded with the special name of fetishism.

The higher and even the lower polytheisms are only alluded to in passing, our object being to keep well in view the conception of a Supreme, or practically Supreme, Being, from the lowest stages of human culture up to Christianity.

Granting our hypothesis of an early Supreme Being among savages, obscured later by ancestor-worship and ghost-gods, but not often absolutely lost to religious tradition, the barbaric and the civilised polytheisms easily take their position in line, and are easily intelligible.

Have your sons degenerated to such a degree as to confound my pure religion, root of the most perfect creeds, with Polytheism and Idolatry?

Do they know that paganism is derived from pagani, which means inhabitant of the fields, who always were faithful to the Greek and Roman Polytheism?

Tell them that Paganism in its widest and most corrupted sense, duly meant Polytheism; that neither my religion nor that of Moses nor Mohammed were ever Pagan religions.