ological. The deity to whom the prophets, seers, and devotees who
founded the particular cult bore witness was worth something to them
personally. They could use him. He guided their imagination, warranted
their hopes, and controlled their will--or else they required him as a
safeguard against the demon and a curber of other people's crimes. In
any case, they chose him for the value of the fruits he seemed to them
to yield.

So soon as the fruits began to seem quite worthless; so soon as they
conflicted with indispensable human ideals, or thwarted too extensively
other values; so soon as they appeared childish, contemptible, or
immoral when reflected on, the deity grew discredited, and was erelong
neglected and forgotten. It was in this way that the Greek and Roman
gods ceased to be believed in by educated pagans; it is thus that we
ourselves judge of the Hindu, Buddhist, and Mohammedan theologies;
Protestants have so dealt with the Catholic notions of deity, and
liberal Protestants with older Protestant notions; it is thus that
Chinamen judge of us, and that all of us now living will be judged by
our descendants. When we cease to admire or approve what the
definition of a deity implies, we end by deeming that deity incredible.

Few historic changes are more curious than these mutations of
theological opinion. The monarchical type of sovereignty was, for
example, so ineradicably planted in the mind of our own forefathers
that a dose of cruelty and arbitrariness in their deity seems
positively to have been required by their imagination. They called the
cruelty "retributive justice," and a God without it would certainly
have struck them as not "sovereign" enough. But today we abhor the
very notion of eternal suffering inflicted; and that arbitrary
dealing-out of salvation and damnation to selected individuals, of
which Jonathan Edwards could persuade himself that he had not only a
conviction, but a "delightful conviction," as of a doctrine "exceeding
pleasant, bright, and sweet," appears to us, if sovereignly anything,
sovereignly irrational and mean. Not only the cruelty, but the
paltriness of character of the gods believed in by earlier centuries
also strikes later centuries with surprise. We shall see examples of
it from the annals of Catholic saintship which makes us rub our
Protestant eyes. Ritual worship in general appears to the modern
transcendentalist, as well as to the ultra-puritanic type of mind, a