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human passions good and bad, became the sole object of worship of the common people, instead of the One God.
That one idea, then, the original import of Θεός, once lost in gross idolatry, Θεός no longer implied "Heaven," as "the One God"; but it now chiefly meant "a god" only,—one of the many "gods" habitually supposed to inhabit Heaven. And, although, as Eusebius remarks (Præp. Ev. lib. iii. p.141, ed. Col.), πρώτιστα πάντων τὸν πρῶτον ἀφορίσαντες θεὸν, εἰδέναι φασί τοῦτον εἶναι τὸν ἐπὶ πᾶσι πρῶτόν τε ὄντα καὶ πάντων θεόν, πατέρα τε καὶ βασιλέα· μεθ' ὅν γένος τὸ θεῶν ὑπάρχειν δεύτερον, ἑπόμενον δὲ τὸ δαιμόνων, τὸ δὲ Ἡρώων, τέταρτον, yet such a religion was not that of the many. But, φάσκοντες πρῶτον ἁπάντων τοὺς Οὐρανίους δεῖν καὶ αἰθερίους θεοὺς θεραπεύειν, "while saying they ought to worship the celestial and the æthereal gods first; δεύτερον, τοὺς ἀγαθοὺς δαίμονας, τρίτον, τὰς τῶν Ἡρώων ψυχὰς, τέταρτον, τοὺς φαύλους, καὶ πονηροὺς ἀπομειλίσσεται δαίμονας;" then, in the second place, the good spirits; thirdly, the souls of great men; and, fourthly, to propitiate the evil spirits; yet ἔργῳ συγχέουσι τὰ πάντα, "they, in fact, mixed it up altogether," μόνας ἀντὶ τῶν εἰρημένων πάντων, τὰς πονηρὰς δυνάμεις θεραπεύοντες, καὶ ὅλοι ταύταις καταδουλούμενοι· "serving, out of all those, the powers of evil alone, and giving themselves up wholly to worship them."
It would be wrong to affirm that they all wilfully did so. Yet it is true that even the greatest and the best of them were led passively, by "the vanity of
