“The people were accustomed to consider their deities as ever present, distinct from, and yet inseparably joined with them; so that the individual, the country, the tribes, were ever governed, guarded, favoured, or opposed by special and peculiar gods.  Olympus had a history, since the acts of the gods took place in time and were coincident with the history of nations, so that every event in heaven corresponded with one on earth; the idea of divine justice was exemplified in that of men, and both were perfected together.  Among pagans of the Aryan race there was a perpetual and repeated alliance between men and gods made in the image of man.  This action of the gods both for good and evil became in its turn the rule of life for the ignorant multitude, and they acted in conformity with the supposed will and actions of the gods; the divine will was, however, nothing but an a priori religious conception of an idol representing the forces of nature or some moral or religious idea.  The moral perfection of nations, as time went on, also perfected the supreme justice of Olympus, and the moral worth of the gods increased as men became better.  So that it was not the original theological idea, but man himself, who made heaven more perfect, and the gods morally better and more just.

“The explicit power of mental reasoning and of science was added to this spontaneous evolution of the religious idea, so far as the improved morality of the race perfected the heavenly justice which was its own creation.  The pagan Olympus was gradually simplified by sages and philosophers; the illicit passions of the gods were set aside, and it was transformed into a providential government of individuals and of society, much more remote from direct contact with men.  The conception of the immortal gods included one supreme power, formative, protecting or avenging, and this conception bordered on the Semitic idea of the absolute Being, although without quite attaining to it.  God was confounded with the order of things, his laws were those of the universe, by which he was also bound, and the righteous man lived in conformity with these laws.  When Christianity began, pagan rationalism had arrived at the idea of a spiritual and directing power, organically identical with the universe.  It was neither the Olympus of the common people, nor the Semitic Jehovah, but rather the conscious and inevitable order of nature.  Although, either as an Olympus or as a dogma, the deity was confounded with men or constrained them to follow a more rational rule of life, yet paganism clearly distinguished the gods from men in their concrete personality, and the action of humanity was therefore distinct from that of the deity.