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 abandoned to unmitigated reprobation.  The account which so candid a writer as Mosheim gives of them is worth noticing, on account of its sweeping character.  “All the nations of the world,” he says, “except the Jews, were plunged in the grossest superstition.  Some nations, indeed, went beyond others in impiety and absurdity, but all stood charged with irrationality and gross stupidity in matters of religion.”  “The greater part of the gods of all nations were ancient heroes, famous for their achievements and their worthy deeds, such as kings, generals, and founders of cities.”  “To these some added the more splendid and useful objects in the natural world, as the sun, moon, and stars; and some were not ashamed to pay divine honors to mountains, rivers, trees, etc.”  “The worship of these deities consisted in ceremonies, sacrifices, and prayers.  The ceremonies were, for the most part, absurd and ridiculous, and throughout debasing, obscene, and cruel.  The prayers were truly insipid and void of piety, both in their form and matter.”  “The priests who presided over this worship basely abused their authority to impose on the people.”  “The whole pagan system had not the least efficacy to produce and cherish virtuous emotions in the soul; because the gods and goddesses were patterns of vice, the priests bad men, and the doctrines false."[5]