agan gods: they would not worship them; whereas
the Greek philosophers as a rule respected worship, however far they went
in their criticism of men's ideas of the gods. We shall not dwell here on
this aspect of the matter; we are concerned with the theory only. Detailed
expositions of it occur in numerous writings, from the passages in the Old
Testament where heathenism is attacked, to the defences of Christianity by
the latest Fathers of the Church.

The original Jewish view, according to which the heathen gods are real
beings just as much as the God of the Jews themselves--only Jews must not
worship them--is in the later portions of the Old Testament superseded by
the view that the gods are only images made of wood, stone or metal, and
incapable of doing either good or evil. This point of view is taken over
by later Jewish authors and completely dominates them. In those acquainted
with Greek thought it is combined with Euhemeristic ideas: the images
represent dead men. The theory that the gods are really natural
objects--elements or heavenly bodies--is occasionally taken into account
too. Alongside of these opinions there appears also the view that the
pagan gods are evil spirits (demons). It is already found in a few places
in the Old Testament, and after that sporadically and quite incidentally
in later Jewish writings; in one place it is combined with the Old
Testament's account of the fallen angels. The demon-theory is not an
instrument of Jewish apologetics proper, not even of Philo, though he has
a complete demonology and can hardly have been ignorant of the
Platonic-Stoic doctrine of demons.

Apart from the few and, as it were, incidental utterances concerning
demons, the Jewish view of the pagan gods impresses one as decidedly
atheistic. The god is identical with the idol, and the idol is a dead
object, the work of men's hands, or the god is identical with a natural
object, made by God to be sure, but without soul or, at any rate, without
divinity. It is remarkable that no Jewish controversialist seriously
envisaged the problem of the real view of the gods embodied in the popular
belief of the ancients, namely, that they are personal beings of a higher
order than man. It is inconceivable that men like Philo, Josephus and the
author of the Wisdom of Solomon should have been ignorant of it. I know
nothing to account for this curious phenomenon; and till some light has
been thrown upon the matter, I should hesita