"Polytheism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Jewish people under the Maccabees, or the earlier under Joshua, every philosophic reader will have felt the true and transcendent spirit of mercy which resides virtually in such wars, as maintaining the unity of God against Polytheism and, by trampling on cruel idolatries, as indirectly opening the channels for benign principles of morality through endless generations of men. Here especially he will have read one justification of Wordsworth's bold doctrine upon war. Thus far he will destroy a wisdom ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... not the poetry of action or heroic enterprise, but of faith in a supreme Providence, and resignation to the power that governs the universe. As the idea of God was removed farther from humanity and a scattered polytheism, it became more profound and intense, as it became more universal, for the Infinite is present to everything: "If we fly into the uttermost parts of the earth, it is there also; if we turn to the east or the west, ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... here been set forth concerning the attitude of ancient society to atheism: it is, in the first place, evident that the frequently mentioned tolerance of polytheism was not extended to those who denied its gods; in fact, it was applied only to those who acknowledged them even if they worshipped others besides. But the assertion of this principle of intolerance varied greatly in practice according to whether it was a question of ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... mysteries, like the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Metastoicheiosis (transubstantiation), the Real Presence, the Eucharist and the Seven Sacraments; when Arnobius could ask, Quid Deo cum vino est? and when Justin, fearing the charge of Polytheism, could expressly declare the inferior nature of the Son to the Father. Hence the creed was appropriately called Symbol i.e., Sign of the Secret. This "mental reservation" lasted till the Edict of Toleration, issued by ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... Antony and the actress Cytheris in their chariot drawn by tigers! What a character would he paint of that Flora who gave her gardens to the Roman people! It would draw tears to your eyes. No man was ever so learned in the female manners of the last centuries of polytheism as Sidonia. You would have supposed that he had devoted his studies peculiarly to that period if you had not chanced to draw him to the Italian middle ages. And even these startling revelations ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... to the cheerful and hopeful feelings, and in their influencing the mind through fear. The notions of guilt and expiation, of evil and good to come, and of dealings with the invisible world, were in some shape or other preeminent in them, and formed a striking contrast to the classical polytheism, which was gay and graceful, as was natural in a civilized age. The new rites, on the other hand, were secret; their doctrine was mysterious; their profession was a discipline, beginning in a formal initiation, manifested ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... people. Robust, they became athletic and vigorous and excelled in the use of deadly weapons; passionate, they easily went from litigation to blows; imaginative, they leaned toward poetry and song and were strong for whatever religion they practised. The latter was a polytheism brought close to the people through the Druids. Some stone weapons were doubtless still used; they had also brazen or bronze swords, and spears, axes, and maces of various alloys of copper and tin. Socially they remained ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... treating of the races of mankind as descended from Shem, Ham, and Japhet, and therein of the early condition of man in his antique form. He then dwelt on the pre-eminence of the Greeks in Art and Philosophy, and noticed the suitableness of polytheism to small insulated states, in which patriotism acted as a substitute for religion, in destroying or suspending self. Afterwards, in consequence of the extension of the Roman empire, some universal or common spirit became necessary ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... long ages of darkness, devil-worship, and polytheism (in its grossest forms all around), the Jew stood up in unfaltering protest against all. Persecutions, proscriptions, tortures in every form, were of no avail. On the gibbet, on the rack, amid the flames, his last words embodied the central confession of Judaism, "O Israel, the Lord thy ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... anthropomorphism. In truth, this would-be scientific mode of speech is as anthropomorphic as is the cosmogony of Hesiod, only on a smaller scale. Primitive religion ascribed life to everything of which it talked. Polytheism in religion and independent forces and self-existent laws in science are thus upon a par. The gods many and lords many, so amenable to concrete presentation in poetry and art, have given place to one Supreme Being. So also light, heat, and other ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... have occurred to every reader, but none will perhaps object to it, when once suggested to his consideration, that—as is the god of any nation, such will be that nation. God, however falsely conceived of by man. even though splintered into fragments by Polytheism, or disfigured by the darkest mythologies, is still the greatest of all objects offered to human contemplation. Man, when thrown upon his own delusions, may have raised himself, or may have adopted from ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... since gods of all shapes and dimensions may be framed by the boundless powers of imagination, or by the frauds and follies of men, in countries never connected; but when features of resemblance, too strong to have been accidental, are observable in different systems of polytheism, without fancy or prejudice to color them and improve the likeness, we can scarce help believing that some connection has immemorially subsisted between the several nations who have adopted them. It ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... visitors of King Cheops had themselves rejected the Sabaistic polytheism of their kinsmen, they had not rejected the doctrine that the stars in their courses affect the fortunes of men. We know that among the Jews, probably the direct descendants of the shepherd-chiefs ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... and grows up with them,—that congenital gift which good Bishop Hall would look for in a wife,—is attributed to "Nature." In fact "Nature" and "Grace," as handled by the scholastics, are nothing more nor less than two hostile Divinities in the Pantheon of post-classical polytheism. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Church, Low Church, Broad Church, Free Church; ultramontanism[obs3]; papism, papistry; monkery[obs3]; papacy; Anglicanism, Catholicism, Romanism; popery, Scarlet Lady, Church of Rome, Greek Church. paganism, heathenism, ethicism[obs3]; mythology; polytheism, ditheism[obs3], tritheism[obs3]; dualism; heathendom[obs3]. Judaism, Gentilism[obs3], Islamism, Islam , Mohammedanism, Babism[obs3], Sufiism, Neoplatonism, Turcism[obs3], Brahminism, Hinduism, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the same law of progress holds. The tribal homogeneous industry, when one man did work at everything, became heterogeneous, special, and complex, as society enlarged and advanced into higher integrations, and as the life of the individual became more and more advanced through Fetichism, Polytheism, Monotheism, to our modern inception ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... Roman, and the Barbarian, as they met before their respective altars, easily persuaded themselves, that under various names, and with various ceremonies, they adored the same deities. [5] The elegant mythology of Homer gave a beautiful, and almost a regular form, to the polytheism of the ancient world. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... students used the term law in somewhat the same way as the more philosophical believers in polytheism spoke of their gods, or as Plato of the ideas which he conceived to control Nature. We see by this instance how hard it is to get rid of old ways of thinking. Even when the new have been adopted we very often find that something of the ancient ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... folly of trying to unite the old notions of a Christian commonwealth with what was fundamentally his own notion of a commonwealth after the ancient type. He stripped the pagan republics, which he took for his model, of their national and official polytheism, and he put on in its stead a scanty remnant of ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... the theological doctrine of the Logos which bulks so largely in the writings of the apologists of the 2nd century came to the front, the trinitarian problem became acute. The necessity of a constant protest against polytheism led to a tenacious insistence on the divine unity, and the task was to reconcile this unity with the deity of Jesus Christ. Some thinkers fell back on the "modalistic'' solution which regards "Father'' and "Son'' as two aspects of the same subject, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... they awaited as a prospective conqueror coming to crush the enemies of their nation. All other nations, tongues, and peoples, bowed to pagan deities, and their worship comprized nought but the sensual rites of heathen idolatry. Paganism was a religion of form and ceremony, based on polytheism—a belief in the existence of a multitude of gods, which deities were subject to all the vices and passions of humanity, while distinguished by immunity from death. Morality and virtue were unknown as elements of heathen service; ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... themselves, upon which they can form no theoretical conclusion, they fly for satisfaction to the most simple, but most ineffectual of all solutions—the agency of invisible beings, with which, in their opinion, all nature is filled. Hence the rise of Polytheism and local deities, which have overspread the face of the earth, under the different titles of guardian gods or tutelary saints. Hence magnificent temples and splendid statues have been erected to aid the imagination of votaries, and to realize objects of worship, which, though supposed ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... system as an antithesis to the Gentile Christianity. In Hebrew the corresponding noun never occurs in the Bible, and it is rare even in the Rabbinic books. When it does meet us, Jahaduth implies the monotheism of the Jews as opposed to the polytheism of ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams
... of the Egyptians—vulgarly gross in its literal meaning as well as in its mystical interpretation, and peculiarly the foundation of many wild doctrines,—was disowned by the principles of general toleration, and the system of polytheism received by Rome, and was excluded by repeated laws from the respect paid by the empire to almost every other religion, however extravagant or absurd. Nevertheless, these Egyptian rites had charms for the curious and the superstitious, and had, after ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... faculties which first led man to believe in unseen spiritual agencies, then in fetishism, polytheism, and ultimately in monotheism, would infallibly lead him, as long as his reasoning powers remained poorly developed, to various strange superstitions and customs. Many of these are terrible to think of—such as the ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... 'selves' it comports and carries has to be left entirely problematic. It may be polytheistically or it may be monotheistically conceived of. 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. Only one thing is certain, and that is the result of our criticism of the absolute: the only way to escape from the paradoxes and perplexities that a consistently thought-out monistic universe suffers ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... Pantheism, Polytheism, and Idolatry, and their Demoralizing Tendency. Counteracting Influences. Contradictory Views of Hindu Character. Professor Max Muller. Sir Thomas Munro. Sir ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... from the rank of angels were still permitted to roam upon earth, to torment the bodies and to seduce the minds of sinful men. It was confessed, or at least it was imagined, that they had distributed among themselves the most important characters of Polytheism, one daemon assuming the name of Jupiter, another of AEsculapius, a third of Venus, and a fourth ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... from the iron furnace of Egypt, they carried with them so intense an abhorrence of all that savoured of Misraim that they put away from them polytheism and repudiated idolatry; they swept away as well the doctrine of life after death, such as dominated the Egyptian mind, that they might focus all their desires ...
— Castles and Cave Dwellings of Europe • Sabine Baring-Gould
... the virtuous and well-disposed, are oppressed. It is hardly likely that a fitter opportunity will soon offer for an examination of the claims of Christianity. We have nothing to dread but the deadness and indifference of the public mind. It is not credible that polytheism should stand a day upon any fair comparison of it with the religion of Christ. You yourself are not a believer (pardon my boldness) in the ineffable stupidities of the common religion. To suppose you were—I see by the expression of your countenance—would be the unpardonable offence. I sincerely ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... his being an artificer in brass or iron: or an artificer in any degree. Hence we must be cautious in forming ideas of the antient theology of nations from the current notions of the Greeks, and Romans; and more especially from the descriptions of their poets. Polytheism, originally vile, and unwarrantable, was rendered ten times more base by coming through their hands. To instance in one particular: among all the daemon herd what one is there of a form, and character, so odious, and contemptible as Priapus? an obscure ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... Sannazzaro by way of Garcilaso's second eclogue. The next is a discussion somewhat after the manner of the Nut-Brown Maid, again paraphrased from the Diana (Book I); while the eighth, lastly, is a homily on the superiority of Christianity over Roman polytheism, in which under obsolete forms the author no doubt intended an allusion to contemporary controversies. Thus it will be seen that Googe follows Latin and Spanish traditions almost exclusively: the only point in which it is ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... rationalism; neither imagination nor reason allowed itself to be completely vanquished. And thus the body of Catholic dogma became a system of contradictions, more or less successfully harmonized. The Trinity was a kind of pact between monotheism and polytheism, and humanity and divinity sealed a peace in Christ, nature covenanted with grace, grace with free will, free will with the Divine prescience, and so on. And it is perhaps true, as Hermann says (loc. cit.), that "as soon as we develop religious ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... first catch sight of it, is entangled with Greek religion. We are accustomed to think of Greek religion as the religion of art and beauty, the religion of which the Olympian Zeus and the Athena Polias are the idols, the poems of Homer the sacred books. Thus Cardinal Newman speaks of "the classical polytheism which was gay and graceful, as was natural in a civilised age." Yet such a view is only a partial one; in it the eye is fixed on the sharp, bright edge of high Hellenic culture but loses sight of the sombre world across which it strikes. Greek religion, where ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... assume an extraordinarily important place in the history of theology, or to affect, in any material respect, our views as to the origin of religion. 2. That no connection is to be traced between the religion of the Egyptians and the religion of the Hebrews. A more decided polytheism than that of Egypt cannot be imagined. So far from recognizing any thing like the supremacy of a single Divine Being in their theological system, we can scarcely even trace any thing answering to that primacy of Jupiter which preserves at least a vestige of monotheism ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... principle of the Jewish code was to establish the doctrine of the unity of God. Idolatry had crept into the religious system of all the other nations of the world, and a degrading polytheism was everywhere prevalent. The Israelites had not probably escaped the contagion of bad example, and the suggestions of evil powers. The most necessary truth to impress upon the nation was the God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob. Jehovah ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... only that it supposes the existence of life wherever it finds activity—an error which can "easily be brought to the test of verification" and corrected. "We can show it to be an error, and so get rid of it." But Polytheism, seeking for greater generality, refers phenomena to beings who are not identified with them, to "indirect wills belonging to beings purely imaginary," whose "existence can no more be decisively disproved than it can be demonstrated." Further, ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... at low stages of civilization and primitive social conditions, religion becomes polytheism at a higher, and monotheism at a still higher stage. It is not the gods that create men, it is man who turns the gods into God. "In the image of himself (man) he created Him" (God), not the opposite way. Monotheism has also suffered changes. It has dissolved ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... like this, is found in the Meditations of the emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, though apparently repugnant to the polytheism commonly admitted by the Stoics, to whom he belonged: "The world, take it all together, is but one; there is but one sort of matter to make it of, one God to govern it, and one law to guide it. For, run through the whole system of rational beings, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... so-called science of political economy, according to which, avowed selfishness is the Rule of the World. It is indeed most important preaching—to preach that there is not one God for religion and another God for human fellowship—and another God for buying and selling—that pestilent polytheism has been largely and confidently preached in our time, and blessed are those who can detect its mendacities, and help to disenchant ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... CAUSE necessarily and proximately generates immortal gods! Hence too it is that philosophers have, in different past ages, undertaken to demonstrate the verity of all religions, and according to the religion of the government under which they lived, they have either supported Polytheism, Theism, Sabinism, Judaism, Popery, or Mahomedanism. The fate of Socrates has never been forgotten by any philosopher who possessed the chief attribute of wisdom—PRUDENCE; and no benevolent man will ever seek to disturb a public faith which promotes ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... BRAHMINICAL PANTHEISM.—The polytheism of the earlier type of religion was converted into pantheism. Brahma, the supreme being, is impersonal, the eternal source of all things, from which all finite beings—gods, nature, and men—emanate. It is by emanation,—an outflow analogous ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... forgetting how considerable these were. The principal divergence was that Christianity, by placing God in an ideal sphere beyond the confines of this world, endeavored to rid itself of every attachment to a frequently abject polytheism. But even if we oppose tradition, we cannot break with the past that has formed us, nor separate ourselves from the present in which we live. As the religious history of the empire is studied more closely, the triumph of ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... saw the same tokens of paganism and barbarity, or worse, than before; only as they were conquered by the Muscovites, and entirely reduced, they were not so dangerous; but for the rudeness of manners, idolatry, and polytheism, no people in the world ever went beyond them. They are clothed all in skins of beasts, and their houses are built of the same. You know not a man from a woman, neither by the ruggedness of their countenances, or their clothes; and in the winter, when the ground ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... collect many quotations from patristic literature to this effect. But the very articles of the Christian Creed militated against the ultimate scorn of the human body: the doctrine of the Resurrection alone was enough to give it more sanctity than could be derived from all the polytheism of antiquity. The Baptism of Christ, the descent into Limbo, and the Crucifixion itself, were scenes from which the use of drapery had to be less or more discarded. The porches and frontals of Gothic churches abounded in nude ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... Nation held, during the Middle Ages, the first and strongest influence over the poetry and thought of Western Europe. The oldest and purest remains of the poets of German Nations are contained in the Scandinavian Edda. Its mythology is founded on Polytheism; but through it, as through the religion of all nations of the world, there is a faint gleam of the one Supreme God, of infinite power, knowledge and wisdom, whose greatness and justice could not be represented in the form of ordinary ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... Providence by the events and the revolutions of this world, we are compelled to believe that it is quite indifferent about the different religions which exist on earth. During thousands of years Paganism, Polytheism, and Idolatry have been the religions of the world; we are assured today, that during this period the most flourishing nations had not the least idea of the Deity, an idea which is claimed, however, to be so important to all men. The Christians ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... theology. The fiendish Panis are concentrated in Ahriman or Anro-mainyas, whose name signifies the "spirit of darkness," and who carries on a perpetual warfare against Ormuzd or Ahuramazda, who is described by his ordinary surname, Spentomainyas, as the "spirit of light." The ancient polytheism here gives place to a refined dualism, not very different from what in many Christian sects has passed current as monotheism. Ahriman is the archfiend, who struggles with Ormuzd, not for the possession of a herd of perishable cattle, but for the dominion ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... suffice to show how Platonic it is. Taylor certainly professed a kind of heathenism. D'lsraeli said, "Mr. T. Taylor, the Platonic philosopher and the modern Plethon,[423] consonant to that philosophy, professes polytheism." Taylor printed this in large type, in a page by itself after the dedication, without any disavowal. I have seen the following, Greek and translation both, in his handwriting: "[Greek: Pas agathos hei agathos ethnikos; ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... narrative is drawn from the same source as these other records. The biblical historians, it is plain, derived their materials from the best human sources available.... The materials which with other nations were combined into the crudest physical theories or associated with a grotesque polytheism were vivified and transformed by the inspired genius of the Hebrew historians, and adapted to become the vehicle of ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... considering the contemporary state of knowledge and speculation, De Brosses's book is brilliant, original, and only now and then rash or confused. Mr. Muller says that De Brosses 'holds that all nations had to begin with fetichism, to be followed afterwards by polytheism and monotheism.' This sentence would lead some readers to suppose that De Brosses, in his speculations, was looking for the origin of religion; but, in reality, his work is a mere attempt to explain a certain element in ancient religion ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... Islamism, Bishop Boyd Carpenter testifies that it "has been, and still is, a great power in the world. There is much in it that is calculated to purify and elevate mankind at a certain stage of history. It has the power of redeeming the slaves of a degraded polytheism from their low groveling conception of God to conceptions which are higher; it has set an example of sobriety to the world and has shielded its followers from the drink plague which destroys the strength of nations. And, in so far ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... that more than ONE Independent Power, or Governing mind exists in the whole universe, is absolute Polytheism, against which the denunciations of all the Jewish, and Christian Canonical books were directed. And if there be but ONE directing MIND, that Mind is GOD!—operating, however, in Three Persons, according to the direct ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... persons receive the formal creed of the same church in the same way. The man of higher grade, and the man of lower, cannot understand things in the same sense because they have not the same faculties for understanding. Hence the polytheism among those called Buddhists. There could be no such thing among the initiated. Religion, then, like everything else, is subject to growth. Such must be the Buddhist doctrine. If, then, Buddhism, or the philosophy which bears that name, originated with the fourth root-race of men, does ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. I, No. 3, March, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... divided amongst a multitude of shoots. This comparison expresses well enough the opinion which tends to prevail amongst our savants on the subject of the historical development of religions. The idea of the only God is at the root,—it is primitive; polytheism is derivative. A forgotten, and as it were slumbering, monotheism exists beneath the worship of idols; it is the concealed trunk which supports them, but the idols have absorbed all the sap. The ancient God (allow me once more a comparison) is like a sovereign confined in the ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... attached to the words "separate attention," that is not fully answered by one part of an exhibition exciting seriousness or pity, and the other raising mirth and loud laughter. That they felt no impiety in the affair is most true. For it is the very essence of that system of Christian polytheism, which in all its essentials is now fully as gross in Spain, in Sicily, and the South of Italy, as it ever was in England in the days of Henry VI. (nay, more so, for a Wicliffe had not then appeared only, but scattered the good seed widely),—it is an essential ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... attention on the lonely wanderer amid the porticoes, and groves, and temples of this classic city, we attempt to conceive the emotion which stirred his heart as he beheld it "wholly given to idolatry;" or whether we contrast the sublime, majestic theism proclaimed by Paul with the degrading polytheism and degenerate philosophy which then prevailed in Athens, or consider the prudent and sagacious manner in which the apostle conducts his argument in view of the religious opinions and prejudices of his audience, we can not but feel that this event is fraught with lessons of ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... Action. Preaching. Questions, Objections, and Replies. Polytheism and Pantheism. Muhammadan ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy
... forms, this pantheism branches out into animism or shamanism, fetichism and phallicism. In its higher forms, it becomes polytheism, idolatry and defective philosophy. Having centuries ago corrupted Buddhism it is the malaria which, unseen and unfelt, is ready to poison and corrupt Christianity. Indeed, it has already given over to disease and spiritual death more than one once hopeful Christian ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... vestiges of it were not visible thirty years later. Its influence, however, might be observed in many of the ceremonies which were introduced into the Church, and the worship of martyrs and relics seemed to revive a system of polytheism by the worship of a hierarchy of saints. Among the most famous of the dignitaries of the Church at this period was the Archbishop of Constantinople, who was distinguished by the epithet of Chrysostom, or the Golden Mouth. He attempted to purify the eastern ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... general term denoting a subordinate superhuman being in monotheistic religions, e.g.. Islam, Judaism, Christianity, and in allied religions, such as Zoroastrianism. In polytheism the grades of superhuman beings are continuous; but in monotheism there is a sharp distinction of kind, as well as degree, between God on the one hand, and all other superhuman beings on the other; ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... and moral corruption. But there are always natures which must possess a faith in which they can trust. These were in search of a religion, and many of them found refuge from the coarse and incredible myths of the gods of polytheism in the purity and monotheism of the Jewish creed. The fundamental ideas of this creed are also the foundations of the Christian faith. Wherever the messengers of Christianity traveled, they met with people with whom they had many religious conceptions in common. ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... search for truth and knowledge, that marked Athens in the classical age; it was a bastard product of Greek elegance and Oriental luxury and sensuousness, a seeking after base pleasures, an assertion of naturalistic polytheism. And hence came the strong reaction against Greek ideas among the bulk of the people, which prevented any permanent fusion of cultures in ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... and traces of a cult practised secretly by the bards—the "Neo-Druidic heresy"; see Davies, Myth. of the Brit. Druids, 1809; Herbert, The Neo-Druidic Heresy, 1838. Several French writers saw in "Druidism" a monotheistic faith, veiled under polytheism. ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... I find that any other fate has awaited the germ of Religion. Arising, like all other kinds of knowledge, and out of the action and interaction of man's mind, with that which is not man's mind, it has taken the intellectual coverings of Fetishism or Polytheism; of Theism or Atheism; of Superstition or Rationalism. With these, and their relative merits and demerits, I have nothing to do; but this it is needful for my purpose to say, that if the religion of the present differs from that of the past, it is because ...
— On the Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge • Thomas H. Huxley
... POLYTHEISM, a belief in a plurality of gods each with a sphere of his own, and each in general a personification of some elemental power concerned in the government of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... incomprehensible dogmas and ostentations, mysterious ceremonies, and found their advantage in the superstition of the multitude,—each new divinity, each new mystery meaning a gain for them. As they had corrupted the primitive religion into polytheism, so Christianity was corrupted by conforming it to the prejudices of those to be converted, in whose eyes the simplicity of the new doctrine would have been no recommendation for it. The Jew sought in it an echo of the Law, the heathen longed for his festivals and his occult philosophy; so it was ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... the dignity of a sacrament) merits among Christians, they received these doctrines without any repugnance, since they were already free from the great obstacles which perversity and corruption, elevated to their highest power—namely, to have polytheism and idolatry as their foundation and support—can present against those doctrines. In the year one thousand five hundred and ninety-five, the Jesuit fathers, Torres and Sanchez, [144] came to this island, and very soon established the Catholic religion ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... intimated, Pantheism is the negation of the Divine Personality in order to arrive at Unity; Polytheism is the negation of the Divine Unity, which is fractioned and divided that its multitudinous action may be conceived. The light fancy was delighted with such divisions, resulting in varied gods and goddesses; but the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... destruction. No one can appreciate the peace, the holy satisfaction of monogamy till he has passed through the wasting distractions, the unrest of polygamy. Plunged right away into monogamy, man, unexperienced in his good fortune, hankers after polygamy, as the monotheistic Jew hankered after polytheism; and thus the monogamic young man too often meets Aphrodite for the first time, and makes future appointments with her, in the arms of his pure young wife. If you have read Swedenborg, you will remember his denunciation of the lust of variety. Now, that is ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... face of a tyrant is a sin.' Then the third damsel retired and came for ward the fourth, who said, 'Here am I to treat of sundry traditions of pious men which suggest themselves to me. It is related that Bishr Barefoot[FN348] said, 'I once heard Khalid say, 'Beware of secret polytheism.' I asked, 'What may secret polytheism be?'; and he answered, 'When one of you in praying prolong his inclinations and prostrations till a cause of impurity[FN349] come upon him.' And one of the sages said, 'Doing works of weal expiateth ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... the world with the original forms of nature, the rocks, the earth, and the sky. It is not the poetry of action or heroic enterprise, but of faith in a supreme Providence, and resignation to the power that governs the universe. As the idea of God was removed farther from humanity, and a scattered polytheism, it became more profound and intense as it became more universal, for the Infinite is present to every thing: "If we fly into the uttermost parts of the earth, it is there also; if we turn to the east or the west, we cannot escape from it." Man is thus aggrandised in the image of his ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... vast but barren desert of polytheism—dark and dreary as were its gloomy domains—there were still, however, to be found some few oases of truth. The philosophers and sages of antiquity had, in the course of their learned researches, aided by the light of nature, discovered something of those inestimable ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... fact, which we will view more closely when we treat of Unity, that the quest for variety which led men into polytheism, or the fractioning of the Deity into false and wicked gods and goddesses, necessarily forced man to the creation of a Fate, to which Jupiter himself was subjected, more blind, more crushing, more appalling to the imagination (because while retaining his entire individuality, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... transfiguration of institutions, as from military and priestly dominance to commercial and scientific dominance, from commercial dominance to proletarian democracy, from slavery to serfdom, from serfdom to capitalism, from monarchy to republicanism, from polytheism to monotheism, from monotheism to atheism, from atheism to pantheistic humanitarianism, from general illiteracy to general literacy, from romance to realism, from realism to mysticism, from metaphysics to physics, are all but changes from Tweedledum to Tweedledee: plus ca change, plus ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... see that, although inculcating homage to a multitude of subordinate divinities, the ancient Astrolatry was only an apparent Polytheism; its enlightened votaries, recognizing the dogma of the unity of God, were in reality Monotheists, paying supreme adoration to the mythical genius of the Sun, to whom we will ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill
... this adoration of the stars and planets that led by degrees to what we call polytheism. Man partitioned those terrible powers of nature of which he felt himself the sport, between a vast number of agents, between crowds of genii upon whose mercies he thought himself dependent, and whom he did his best to propitiate ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... feeling a genuine friendly enthusiasm for persons of the other sex, without gliding into anything with a shorter name, is to know a whole family of them. The most intellectual idolatry at one shrine is apt to lose its purely intellectual character, but a genial polytheism is always bracing and platonic. Besides, the Vivians lived in the same street or rather "gardens" as ourselves, and were amusing as bringing one within sight of what an old friend of mine, named Bentley, called with more than his ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... to the word homoousios conceived that those who approved it favored the opinion of Sabellius and Montanus; they therefore called them blasphemers, as subverting the existence of the Son of God. And again those who defended the term, charging their opponents with polytheism, inveighed against them as introducers of heathen superstitions. Eustathius, bishop of Antioch, accuses Eusebius Pamphilius of perverting the Nicene creed; Eusebius again denies that he violates that exposition of the faith, and accuses Eustathius of introducing the opinion of Sabellius. ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... all-searching gaze. In ancient times they seem to have done the same, as the monuments of Egypt and Babylonia declare; and the intimate knowledge of Nature and its Creator which they had in the morning of our world, degenerated into the nature worship and polytheism which we find so nearly universal at the first dawn of secular history. It is only the child of God, the redeemed man, who can view without flinching the sublime fact of a direct Creation, or face the other great ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... praised the tolerating spirit of the heathens. Well! but the honorable gentleman will recollect that heathens, that polytheists, must permit a number of divinities. It is the very essence of its constitution. 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 honorable gentleman must recollect ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... the dignity of the poet and the poem, deserves to be adopted, without a rigid scrutiny. Some dawnings of a philosophic spirit enlighten the general remarks on the study of history and of man. I am not displeased with the inquiry into the origin and nature of the gods of polytheism, which might deserve the illustration of a riper judgment. Upon the whole, I may apply to the first labour of my pen the speech of a far superior artist, when he surveyed the first productions of his pencil. After viewing some portraits which he had painted in his youth, my friend Sir Joshua ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... eternal types of all things which in this world are variable, transient, and perishable. What he effected by such novel, original, and powerful imagination is clear. He replaced the Olympus of the populace by a spiritual Olympus; the material mythology by an idealistic mythology; polytheism by polyideism, if it may be so expressed—the gods by types. Behind every phenomenon, stream, forest, mountain, the Greeks perceived a deity, a material being like themselves, more powerful than themselves. Behind every phenomenon, behind every ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... Jewish religion is not, as is often supposed, its monotheism, Hebrew religion in its golden age was monolatry rather than monotheism; and when Jahveh became more strictly 'the only God,' the cult of intermediate beings came in, and restored a quasi-polytheism. The distinctive feature in Jewish faith is its historical and teleological character. The God of the Jew is not natural law. If the idea of necessary causation ever forced itself upon his mind, he at once gave it the form of predestination. ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... the movement of pure spirit; or by the use of the "Word" of "Wisdom," half personified as intermediate between God and the world. While these monotheistic, pantheistic doctrines were taught in the schools, the people were left to a debased polytheism and to new superstitions imported from the Orient; the philosophers themselves were by no means unaffected by the popular beliefs. Mingled with all these were the ancient legends of gods and heroes, accepted as inspired scripture by the people, and by philosophers in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... show, too, within the historic period, the same tendency, and especially within the events covered by our sacred books, a progress from fetichism, of which so many evidences crop out in the early Jewish worship as shown in the Old Testament Scriptures, through polytheism, when Jehovah was but "a god above all gods," through the period when he was "a jealous God," capricious and cruel, until he is revealed in such inspired utterances as those of the nobler Psalms, the great passages in Isaiah, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... set in a country of which the author had no experience, but which many of us know under wholly altered conditions. It was to carry on controversies as to the older and the later types of Christianity, as to Polytheism, Judaism, and Monotheism; it was to confute Romanism, Scepticism, and German metaphysics; it was to denounce celibacy and monasticism, to glorify muscular Christianity, to give glowing pictures of Greek sensuousness ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... open-minded observer of the contest must be aware, though the remnants of the broken host still linger on the field. It is now time to consider whether religion must perish with superstition, or whether the death of superstition may not be the new birth of religion. Religion survived the fall of Polytheism; it is surely conceivable that it may survive the fall of Anthropomorphism, and that the desperate struggle which is being waged about the formal belief in "Personality," may be merely the sloughing off of something that when it is gone, will be seen to have not ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... shrine! Might I not, with health and good luck to aid me, create some new 'Prometheus Unbound,' Patrick or Columbcille, Oisin or Fion, in Prometheus's stead, and, instead of Caucasus, Croagh-Patrick or Ben Bulben? Have not all races had their first unity from a polytheism that marries them to rock and hill? We had in Ireland imaginative stories, which the uneducated classes knew and even sang, and might we not make those stories current among the educated classes, re-discovering for the work's sake what I have called 'the applied arts of literature,' ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... a solemn hymn in which some great truths of the world's origin are sublimely set forth. It gives us the distinct idea of the unity of Creation,—sweeping away, at one mighty stroke, the whole system of naturalistic polytheism, which makes science impossible, when it declares that "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." In the same words it sets forth the truth by whose light science alone walks safely, that the source of all things is a spiritual cause. The God from whose power all things ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... than the former. The priests of Fo, coming by invitation from India, imported with them a great portion of the Hindu mythology, which some learned men have supposed to be the origin from whence the Polytheism of Egypt and Greece had its source; and others the direct contrary. Be that as it may, the affinity seems to be too strong not to ascribe them to a common parent; and the representations and the histories of many ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... instead of persecuting, would have protected an order of men who yielded the most passive obedience to the laws, though they declined the active cares of war and government. If, on the other hand, we recollect the universal toleration of Polytheism, as it was invariably maintained by the faith of the people, the incredulity of philosophers, and the policy of the Roman senate and emperors, we are at a loss to discover what new offence the Christians ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... to wholly represent the part. And it is more pathetic and perhaps more instructive to consider the small dog in his conscientious and imperfect efforts to outdo Sir Philip Sidney. For the ideal of the dog is feudal and religious; the ever-present polytheism, the whip-bearing Olympus of mankind, rules them on the one hand; on the other, their singular difference of size and strength among themselves effectually prevents the appearance of the democratic notion. Or we ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... patience, temperance, and other virtues, which he saw must receive from God a recompense after this life. He ardently set about learning what God is; and after some researches into the nature of the Supreme Being, quickly discovered the absurdity of polytheism, or a plurality of gods; and was convinced that there can be only one God, and that the same is eternal, unchangeable, all-powerful, the first cause and author of all things. Full of these reflections, ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... of thought, says: "Sun and moon, the wind and the waters, perform all the functions of living beings; they speak, they eat, they marry and have children" (258.26). The same idea is brought out by Count D'Alviella: "The highest point of development that polytheism could reach, is found in the conception of a monarchy or divine family, embracing all terrestrial beings, and even the whole universe" (388.211). Mr. Frank Cushing attributes like beliefs in the kinship of all existences ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... greatly modified. Monotheism has been supplanted by a gross Polytheism, by the corruption of symbolism. At the head are the Triad Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the preserver, Siva the destroyer. Fourteen more principal deities may be enumerated. To them must be added their female Consorts. Many of the Gods are held to ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... the Chaldaeans, from the very earliest times to which the monuments carry us back, was, in its outward aspect, a polytheism of a very elaborate character. It is quite possible that there may have been esoteric explanations, known to the priests and the more learned, which, resolving the personages of the Pantheon into the powers of nature, reconciled the apparent ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... invent the belief that the air was full of daemons. All the Eastern nations had believed in Genii (Jinns), Fairies (Peris), and Devas, Divs, or devils. The Devas of the early Hindus were beneficent beings: to the eyes of the old Persians (in their hatred of idolatry and polytheism), they appeared evil beings, Divs, or Devils. And even so the genii and daemons of the Roman Empire became, in the eyes of the early Christians, ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... Nippur. Although it did not affect the religion of the masses, it serves to show that among the ancient scholars and thinkers of Babylonia religious thought had, at an early period, risen far above the crude polytheism of those who bargained with their deities and propitiated them with offerings and extravagant flattery, or exercised over them a magical influence by the performance of seasonal ceremonies, like the backsliders in Jerusalem, censured so severely by Jeremiah, ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... use a certain hymn of the Rig-Veda in their daily prayers.[13] Nowhere do we find stronger arguments against idolatry, nowhere has the unity of the Deity been upheld more strenuously against the errors of polytheism than by some of the ancient sages of India. Even in the oldest of their sacred books, the Rig-Veda, composed three or four thousand years ago—where we find hymns addressed to the different deities ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... perplexed with the assurances of those who tell them that, though divine, the Bible is, in fact, a most dangerous book, and who would request them, in their new-born enlightenment, to be pleased to shut their eyes, and to return to a religion of ceremony quite as absurd and almost as cruel as the polytheism they have renounced. I imagine you and your little flock in the Sabbath stillness of those mountains and green valleys, of which you give me such pleasant descriptions, exhibiting a specimen of a truly primitive Christianity; I ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... Orientals, and of the East by Occidentals, is a well-nigh universal misconception as to the nature of man, and of society, and consequently of the laws determining their development. In the East this error arises from and rests upon its polytheism, and the accompanying theories of special national creation and peculiar national sanctity. On these grounds alien races are pronounced necessarily inferior. China's scorn for foreigners is due ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... theologian. The Rationalists, on the other hand, who within certain limits were no less his opponents than the orthodox, derived the strength of their opposition to the systems of dogma, as the Apologists of the second century had already done with regard to polytheism, from their religious belief and their inability to estimate these systems historically. That, however, is only the first impression which one gets here from the history, and it is everywhere modified by other impressions. In the first place, there is no mistaking a certain ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... has played in the world. Here, then, was a body of natural facts to be investigated scientifically, and the result of Hume's inquiries is embodied in the remarkable essay on the Natural History of Religion. Hume anticipated the results of modern investigation in declaring fetishism and polytheism to be the form in which savage and ignorant men naturally clothe their ideas of the unknown influences which govern their destiny; and they are ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... on which were founded the preparation of heart which led to the acceptance of its message, or the prejudices which rejected its claims;—viz. among the masses, a sensuous unintelligent belief in polytheism;—among the educated, disorganization of belief; either materialism, the total rejection of the supernatural, and a political attachment on the principle of expedience to existing creeds; or philosophy, ethical, dualistic, pantheistic, despising religions as mere organic products ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... deities of the Eastern Pantheon, the god representing the destroyer is embodied under the form of a man, while the preserver is symbolized under the form of a woman. This is an adaptation in Polytheism of a great and true idea. Woman is a preserver. Her's is the conservative influence of society. It is from man that the destructive forces that shake the social organization emanate. He wars on his kind and the earth shakes under the ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... (Havell, Indian Sculpture and Painting, illustr. XLV.).] whom he censures, and we may gather that that ignorance was thought to be especially shown in a crude pantheism and a doctrine of incarnation which, according to the Bāb, amounts to sheer polytheism. [Footnote 4: The technical term is 'association.'] God in Himself, says the Bāb, cannot be known, though a reflected image of Him is attainable by taking heed to His ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... deterred by what looked like a relaxing creed. The inspiriting doctrines fell upon the ardent character, and so confirmed its energy. Strong beliefs win strong men, and then make them stronger. Such is no doubt one cause why Monotheism tends to prevail over Polytheism; it produces a higher, steadier character, calmed and concentrated by a great single object; it is not confused by competing rites, or distracted by miscellaneous deities. Polytheism is religion IN COMMISSION, and it is weak accordingly. But ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... in India's Religious Systems—The Early Monotheistic Nature Worship and its Gradual Lapse Into Polytheism—The Influence of Environment on the Development of Systems—The Distinction between Aryanism and Brahmanism, and the Abuses of the Latter in its Doctrines of Sacrifice and Caste—The Causes which Led to the Overthrow of this System of Sacerdotalism—The Upanishads and the Beginnings of Philosophy—The ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... consider at length below this worship of Vishnu and Siva and here will merely point out that it differs from the polytheism of the Smartas. In their higher phases all Hindu religions agree in teaching some form of pantheism, some laying more and some less stress on the personal aspect which the deity can assume. But whereas the pantheism of the Smartas grew out of the feeling that the many gods of ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... exerts on life, that is to say, on thought and conduct. . . . A formal and precise definition of Judaism is a matter of some difficulty, because it raises the question, What is the absolute and irreducible minimum of conformity? . . . Judaism denounces idolatry and polytheism. It believes in a universal God, but it is not exclusive. It believes that this world is good, and that man is capable of perfection. He possesses free will, and is responsible for his actions. Judaism rejects any mediator and any cosmic force for evil. ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... fact, the theistic theory is born of highly suspicious parentage,—that Fetichism, or the crudest form of the theory of personal agency in external nature, admits of being easily traced to the laws of a primitive psychology; that the step from this to Polytheism is easy; and that the step from this to Monotheism is necessary. If it is objected to this view that it does not follow that because some theories of personal agency have proved themselves false, therefore all such theories must be so—I answer, Unquestionably not; but the above considerations ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... everywhere and all the time, it has, and continues to be, inextricably intertwined and influenced by Theistic beliefs, even when and where such beliefs have been the crudest and most debased form of polytheism. ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen |
