667. How is it that polytheism, although it is false, is nevertheless one of the most ancient and wide-spread of human beliefs?

"The conception of the unity of God could only be, in the mind of man, the result of the development of his ideas. Incapable, in his ignorance, of conceiving of an immaterial being, without a determinate form, acting upon matter, man naturally attributed to Him the attributes of corporeal nature, that is to say, a form and a face; and thenceforth everything that appeared to surpass the proportions of an ordinary human intelligence was regarded by him as a divinity. Whatever he could not understand was looked upon by him as being the work of a supernatural power; and, from that assumption, to the belief in the existence of as many distinct powers as the various effects which he beheld but could not account for, there was but a step. But there have been, in all ages, enlightened men who have comprehended the impossibility of the world's being governed by this multitude of powers, without a supreme over-ruling direction, and who have thus been led to raise their thought to the conception of the one sole God."

668. As phenomena attesting the action of spirits have occurred in all ages of the world, and have thus been known from the earliest times, may they not have helped to induce a belief in the plurality of gods?

"Undoubtedly; for, as men applied the term god to whatever surpassed humanity, spirits were, for them, so many gods. For this reason, whenever a man distinguished himself among all others by his actions, his genius, or an occult power incomprehensible by the vulgar, he was made a god of, and was worshipped as such after his death." (603.)

The word god, among the Ancients, had a wide range of meaning. It did not, as in our days, represent the Master of Nature, but was a generic term applied to all beings who appeared to stand outside of the pale of ordinary humanity; and, as the manifestations that have since been known as "spiritist" had revealed to them the existence of incorporeal beings acting as one of the elementary powers of nature, they called them gods, just as we call them spirits. It is a mere question of words; with this difference, however, that, in their ignorance, purposely kept up by those whose interests it served, they built temples and raised altars to them, making them offerings which became highly lucrative for the persons who had charge of this mode of worship; whereas, for us, spirits are merely creatures like ourselves, more or less advanced, and having cast off their earthly envelope. If we carefully study the various attributes of the Pagan divinities, we shall easily recognise those of the spirits of our day, at every degree of the scale of spirit-life, their physical state in worlds of higher advancement, the part taken by them in the things of the earthly life, and the various properties of the perispirit.

Christianity, in bringing its Divine light to our world, has taught us to refer our adoration to the only object to which it is due. But it could not destroy what is an element of nature; and the belief in the existence of the incorporeal beings around us has been perpetuated under various names. Their manifestations have never ceased; but they have been diversely interpreted, and often abused under the veil of mystery beneath which they were kept. While religion has regarded them as miracles, the incredulous have looked upon them as jugglery; but, at the present time, thanks to a more serious study of the subject, carried on in the broad daylight of scientific investigation, the doctrine of spirit-presence and spirit-action, stripped of the superstitious fancies by which it had been obscured for ages, reveals to us one of the sublimest and most important principles of nature.