f that article.
The artificer was imagination, a glorious faculty, which is the highest
dower of the creative artist and the scientific discoverer, and in their
service is fruitful in usefulness and beauty, but which in the service
of theology is a frightful curse, filling the mental world with
fantastic monsters who waylay and devour.

Common people, however, who did the work of the world, were not able
to do much god-making. Their leisure and ability were both limited. But
they had a large capacity for admiring the productions of others, and
their deficiencies were supplied by a special class of men, called
priests, who were set apart for the manufacture of deities, and who
devoted their time and their powers to the holy trade. This pious
division of labor, this specialisation of function, still continues.
Carpenters and tailors, grocers and butchers, who are immersed all the
week in labor or business, have no opportunity for long excursions in
the field of divinity; and therefore they take their religion at second
hand from the priest on Sunday. It was not the multitude, but the
sacred specialists, who built up the gigantic and elaborate edifice of
theology, which is a purely arbitrary construction, deriving all its
design and coherence from the instinctive logic of the human mind, that
operates alike in a fairy tale and in a syllogism.

Primitive man used conveniently-shaped flints before he fashioned flint
instruments; discovery always preceding invention. In like manner he
found gods before he made them. A charm resides in some natural object,
such as a fish's tooth, a queer-shaped pebble, or a jewel, and it is
worn as an amulet to favor and protect. This is fetishism. By-and-bve
counterfeits are made of animals and men, or amalgams of both, and the
fetishistic sentiment is transferred to these. This is the beginning of
polytheism. And how far it extends even into civilised periods, let the
superstitions of Europe attest. The nun who tells her beads, and the
lady who wears an ornamental crucifix, are to some extent fetishists;
while the Catholic worship of saints is only polytheism in disguise.

Reading the Bible with clear eyes, we see that the ancient Jews
worshipped gods of their own making, which were handed down as family
relics. When Jacob made tracks after sucking his uncle dry, Rachel
carried off the poor old fellow's teraphim, and left him without even
a god to worship. Jahveh himself, who has since dev