superstition. It is sad to think that the decline of sacerdotalism is
associated with the growth of infidelity and religious indifference,
showing how few worship God in spirit and in truth even in Christian
countries. Yet even that reaction is humanly natural; and as it so
surely follows upon epochs of priestcraft, it may be a part of the
divine process of arousing men to the evils of superstition.

Among all nations where polytheism prevailed, idolatry became a natural
sequence,--that is, the worship of animals and of graven images, at
first as symbols of the deities that were worshipped, generally the sun,
moon, and stars, and the elements of Nature, like fire, water, and air.
But the symbols of divine power, as degeneracy increased and ignorance
set in, were in succession worshipped as deities, as in India and Africa
at the present day. This is the lowest form of religion, and the most
repulsive and degraded which has prevailed in the world,--showing the
enormous difference between the primitive faiths and the worship which
succeeded, growing more and more hideous with the progress of ages,
until the fulness of time arrived when God sent reformers among the
debased people, more or less supernaturally inspired, to declare new
truth, and even to revive the knowledge of the old in danger of being
utterly lost.

It is a pleasant thing to remember that the religions thus far treated,
as known to the Jews, and by which they were more or less contaminated,
have all passed away with the fall of empires and the spread of divine
truth; and they never again can be revived in the countries where they
nourished. Mohammedanism, a monotheistic religion, has taken their
place, and driven the ancient idols to the moles and the bats; and where
Mohammedanism has failed to extirpate ancient idolatries, Christianity
in some form has come in and dethroned them forever.