among the
Hebrews and the Persians), the easier it has been for the people to
attach themselves to a single deity as all-sufficient. The Romans form
no exception to this general rule, for though, while they did not create
great anthropomorphic deities, there was yet no native Roman movement
toward monolatry, the place of such deities in worship was taken by a
multitude of minor divine patrons who presided over all the details of
private and public life and satisfied the demand for divine guidance.

While polytheism has assumed various forms, differing from one another
in elaboration of deities and in general cultural character, it has had,
as a system, a distinctly marked place in human experience.

+965+. _General role of polytheism._ Polytheism has played a great role
in the religious history of the world. Representing in general a
thoughtful protest against the earlier shapeless mass of spirits, it
expressed more definitely the belief in the intellectual and moral
divine control of all things. It flourished at a time when there was no
general demand in human thought for cooeperation in supernatural Powers.
The sense of variety in the world was predominant, corresponding to the
absence of cooeperation among the tribes and nations of the world; the
apparently isolated character of natural phenomena and the independence
of the nations, each of the others, seemed to men to demand a number of
separate divine agencies. These were all made to accord with the
external and internal condition of their worshipers and met the demands
of life in that they represented redemption, salvation, and, in general,
all blessings. They were not offensive ethically to the people for the
reason that they embodied the ethical conceptions and usages of their
time. Thus they furnished the framework for religious feeling--they
secured the union of divine and human in life, brought the divine,
indeed, into most intimate contact with the human, and so supplied the
material for the expression of pious feeling. When the gods were
represented by idols, these tended to become merely the symbols and
reminders of their divine originals. The elastic character of this
theistic system permitted the widest variety of cults, with the
possibility of bringing any new social tendency or idea into immediate
connection with a divine patron, so that human life became religious
with a degree of intelligence and intensity that has perhaps not existed
under any othe