CHAP. II—COMPARISON AND APPRAISEMENT OF RELIGIONS.
§ 1. Early Forces of Reform. Christian partisanship—Difficulty of being impartial—The authoritarian ideal—Genius and religious reform—Rarity of reform through priesthoods—Reality of priestcraft
§ 2. Reform as a Religious Process. Fictitious literature—Reform by strategy—Conditions of moral betterment for the Hebrews—Conditions of religious survival
§ 3. Polytheism and Monotheism. Religious evolution conditioned politically and socially—Monotheism and polytheism alike thus conditioned—No unique bias in the case of Israel—Pressures towards monotheism and towards polytheism—The former usually an external bias, without psychological sincerity—Hebrew and Roman theology compared—Monotheism does grow out of polytheism—Hebrew monotheism not a monarchic but a sacerdotal creation—Monotheistic and polytheistic ethic compared—The conventional view—Ethic associated with "Supreme" Gods—Rational tests—Ethic of post-exilic Judaism—Economic forces in cult-making—Chastening effects of national disaster
§ 4. Hebrews and Babylonians. Babylonian influences on Judaic thought—Higher developments of polytheism—International ethic lower among monotheists than among polytheists
§ 5. Forces of Religious Evolution. The socio-political factors—Social decadence in Mesopotamia, with religious activity—Fatality of imperialism
§ 6. The Hebrew Evolution. Rise of the cult of Yahweh—Literary beginnings—Practical polytheism—The attempted reforms of Josiah—Probable negative results—Developments of Yahwism in the exile—Effects of Persian contact—The Return a process of hierocratic selection—The process of literary fabrication Higher literary fruition
§ 7. Post-Exilic Phases. Cramping effects of racial sectarianism—Change nevertheless inevitable—Modifications of belief—Hebrew thought monotheistic only on the surface—Polytheistic superstition never eliminated—Early Christian and Moslem thought on the same plane—Social failure in Jewry as elsewhere—Expansion of Jewry in Gentile lands—Hellenistic reactions—The Maccabean renascence
§ 8. Revival and Disintegration. The renascence a second process of hierocratic selection—Parallel case of Parsism—Special fecundity of Jews—Renewed process of doctrinal modification—Development of a Secondary God—The Jesuist movement—Its dependent relation to Judaism up till the destruction of the Temple—Fusion of the secondary God-ideas in Jesus—The economic situation—Separate Christism a result of the fall of the Temple—Later Judaism—Persistence of sacrifice up to the political catastrophe—Conventional comparisons of Hebrew and Greek ethic and character
§ 9. Conclusion. All religions processes of evolutionary change—General law of the substitution of Son-Gods for the older—Analogous cases in Greece, Babylon, Egypt, Persia, and Jewry—The psychological process—Modification of Indra—His supersession by Krishna—Adaptations of Osiris—Advent of Serapis—Jesus—Apollo, Dionysos, and Zeus—Recession of the Supreme God—Heresy and dissent phases of the total evolutionary process—Conditions of sect-survival—Conditions of survival for deities—The Holy Spirit—The Virgin Mother—Yahweh and Jesus—Mary and Anna—Joseph and Mary—Christ-making thus a form of Secondary-God-making—All Secondary Gods evolved from prior materials—The moral metamorphosis of Bacchus—"Culture-religion" thus an evolution from "nature-religion"