History of Religious Evolution 717 



descendants began to make Mars an aggressive and blood- 

 thirsty deity, who incited them to battle; when they degraded 

 the winter festival of Saturn into licentious saturnalia, did 

 the agencies — alike mental, moral, and spiritual — start, that 

 gradually sapped the strength of the republic and the empire, 

 till its fall hundreds of years afterward ensued. 



Practically the same history has been gone through by 

 every nation that has risen and in time decayed. 



The degree of elaboration in polytheistic worship has usually 

 corresponded to the relative intensity of proenvironal worship, 

 or of wealth, or of enlarged outlook on the world and the uni- 

 verse. Thus, alike in early Egyptian, Iranian, Assyrian, 

 Greek, Hebrew, and Roman polytheistic history, simple shrines 

 or altars were set up under the trees, or in some spot that was 

 associated with some revered tribal or national event. This 

 altar then stood for, or was a material reminder of, the spiritic 

 personality for whom it had been reared. 



But, amongst stagnating or rude nations for thousands of 

 years up to our ow^n time, the presence of the deities might 

 be suggested by rude sticks, stones, pieces of metal, carved 

 stones and metal, or even humanized likenesses in wood, metal, 

 or stone. These constitute the objects round which poly- 

 theistic fetish worship centers, and all stages in the elabora- 

 tion of the representative objects still exist amongst tribes 

 of the world. Not unfrequently the objects themselves were 

 figures used in a simpler animistic, naturalistic, or even ances- 

 tralistic phase of religious development, or even the deified 

 chiefs, kings, or emperors who had ruled over them, as in the 

 case of the early Egyptians of 4000-5000 B. Cor of the Romans 

 of 2000 years ago, and which had become invested with more 

 and more expansive deistic conceptions. 



The latter, or personified deistic representation, gradually 

 spread amongst most polytheistic nations, and so degraded 

 to mere human level those higher proenvironal aspirations 

 that had carried man outward and upward to recognition 

 of the primal forces of the world, the great heavenly bodies, 

 and the orderly movements that these showed. 



