May not the contrast between the Patriarchs and the Pharaohs, David and the Philistines, the Persians and the Babylonians, mark a law of history of wider application than we are wont to suspect?
But if so, what was the parent of idolatry?
For a natural genesis it must have had, whether it be a healthy and necessary development of the human mind--as some hold, not without weighty arguments on their side; or whether it be a diseased and merely fungoid growth, as I believe it to be.

I cannot hold that it originated in Nature-worship, simply because I can find no evidence of such an origin.

There is rather evidence, if the statements of the idolaters themselves are to be taken, that it originated in the worship of superior races by inferior races; possibly also in the worship of works of art which those races, dying out, had left behind them, and which the lower race, while unable to copy them, believed to be possessed of magical powers derived from a civilisation which they had lost.

After a while the priesthood, which has usually, in all ages and countries, proclaimed itself the depository of a knowledge and a civilisation lost to the mass of the people, may have gained courage to imitate these old works of art, with proper improvements for the worse, and have persuaded the people that the new idols would do as well as the old ones.

Would that some truly learned man would 'let his thoughts play freely' round this view of the mystery, and see what can be made out of it.