Comparative Theology, pursuing its impartial course as a positive science,
will avoid the error into which most of the Christian apologists of the
last century fell, in speaking of ethnic or heathen religions. In order to
show the need of Christianity, they thought it necessary to disparage all
other religions. Accordingly they have insisted that, while the Jewish and
Christian religions were revealed, all other religions were invented;
that, while these were from God, those were the work of man; that, while
in the true religions there was nothing false, in the false religions
there was nothing true. If any trace of truth was to be found in
Polytheism, it was so mixed with error as to be practically only evil. As
the doctrines of heathen religions were corrupt, so their worship was only
a debasing superstition. Their influence was to make men worse, not
better; their tendency was to produce sensuality, cruelty, and universal
degradation. They did not proceed, in any sense, from God; they were not
even the work of good men, but rather of deliberate imposition and
priestcraft. A supernatural religion had become necessary in order to
counteract the fatal consequences of these debased and debasing
superstitions. This is the view of the great natural religions of the
world which was taken by such writers as Leland, Whitby, and Warburton in
the last century. Even liberal thinkers, like James Foster[3] and John
Locke,[4] declare that, at the coming of Christ, mankind had fallen into
utter darkness, and that vice and superstition filled the world. Infidel
no less than Christian writers took the same disparaging view of natural
religions. They considered them, in their source, the work of fraud; in
their essence, corrupt superstitions; in their doctrines, wholly false; in
their moral tendency, absolutely injurious; and in their result,
degenerating more and more into greater evil.

A few writers, like Cudworth and the Platonists, endeavored to put in a
good word for the Greek philosophers, but the religions of the world were