2.  Render to the Immortal Gods the consecrated cult; Guard then thy faith:

    Pythagoras, of whom a modern savant (Francis Bacon), otherwise most
estimable, has rather thoughtlessly reproached with being a fanatical and
superstitious man, begins his teaching, nevertheless, by laying down a
principle of universal tolerance.  He commands his disciples to follow the
cult established by the laws, whatever this cult may be, and to adore the
gods of their country, what ever those gods may be; enjoining them only, to
guard afterwards their faith - that is, to remain inwardly faithful to his
doctrine, and never to divulge the mysteries.  Lysis, in writing these
opening lines, adroitly conceals herein a double meaning.  By the first he
commended, as I have said, tolerance and reserve for the Pythagorean, and,
following the example of the Egyptian priests, established two doctrines,
the one apparent and vulgar, conformable to the law; the other mysterious
and secret, analogous to the faith; by the second meaning, he reassures the
suspicious people of Greece, who, according to the slanders which were in
circulation might have feared that the new sect would attack the sanctity of
their gods.  This tolerance on the one hand, and this reserve on the other,
were no more than what they would be today.  The Christian Religion,
exclusive and severe, has changed all our ideas in this respect: by
admitting only one sole doctrine in one unique church, this religion has
necessarily confused tolerance with indifference or coldness, and reserve
with heresy or hypocrisy; but in the spirit of polytheism these same things
take on another colour.  A Christian philosopher could not, without
perjuring himself and committing a frightful impiety, bend the knee in China
before Kong-Tse, nor offer incense to Chang-Ty nor to Tien; he could neither
render, in India, homage to Krishna, nor present himself at Benares as a
worshipper of Vishnu; he could not even, although recognizing the same God
as the Jews and Mussulmans, take part in their ceremonies, or what is still
more, worship this God with the Arians, the Lutherans, or Calvinists, if he
were a Catholic.  This belongs to the very essence of his cult.  A
Pythagorean philosopher did not recognize in the least these formidable
barriers, which hem in the nations, as it were, isolate them, and make them
worse than enemies.  The gods of the people were in his eyes the same gods,
and his cosmopolitan dogmas condemned no one to eternal damnation.  From one
end of the earth to the other he could cause incense to rise from the altar
of the Divinity, under whatever name, under whatever form it might be
worshipped, and render to it the public cult established by the law.  And
this is the reason.  Polytheism was not in their opinion what it has become
in ours, an impious and gross idolatry, a cult inspired by the infernal
adversary to seduce men and to claim for itself the honours which are due
only to the Divinity; it was a particularization of the Universal Being, a
personification of its attributes and its faculties.  Before Moses, none of
the theocratic legislators had thought it well to present for the adoration
of the people, the Supreme God, unique and uncreated in His unfathomable
universality.  The Indian Brahmans, who can be considered as the living
types of all the sages and of all the pontiffs of the world, never permit
themselves, even in this day when their great age has effaced the traces of
their ancient science, to utter the name of God, principle of All.  They are
content to meditate upon its essence in silence and to offer sacrifices to
its sublimest emanations.  The Chinese sages act the same with regard to the
Primal Cause, that must be neither named nor defined; the followers of
Zoroaster, who believe that the two universal principles of good and evil,
Ormuzd and Ahriman, emanate from this ineffable Cause, are content to
designate it under the name of Eternity.  The Egyptians, so celebrated for
their wisdom, the extent of their learning, and the multitude of their
divine symbols, honoured with silence the God, principle and source of all
things; they never spoke of it, regarding it as inaccessible to all the
researches of man; and Orpheus, their disciple, first author of the
brilliant mythology of the Greeks, Orpheus, who seemed to announce the soul
of the World as creator of this same God from which it emanated said
plainly:
    "I never see this Being surrounded with a cloud."
    Moses, as I have said, was the first who made a public dogma of the
unity of God, and who divulged what, up to that time had been buried in the
seclusion of the sanctuaries; for the principle tenets of the mysteries,
those upon which reposed all others, were the Unity of God and the
homogeneity of Nature.  It is true that Moses, in making this disclosure,
permitted no definition, no reflection, either upon the essence or upon the
nature of this unique Being; this is very remarkable.  Before him, in all
the known world, and after him (save in Judea where more than one cloud
still darkened the idea of divine Unity, until the establishment of
Christianity), the Divinity was considered by the theosophists of all
nations, under two relations: primarily as unique, secondarily as infinite;
as unique, preserved under the seal of silence to the contemplation and
meditation of the sages; as infinite, delivered to the veneration and
invocation of the people.  Now the unity of God resides in His essence so
that the vulgar can never in any way either conceive or understand.  His
infinity consists in His perfections, His faculties, His attributes, of
which the vulgar can, according to the measure of their understanding, grasp
some feeble emanations, and draw nearer to Him by detaching them from the
universality - that is, by particularizing and personifying them.  This is
the particularization and the personification which constitutes, as I have
said, polytheism.  The mass of gods which result from it, is as infinite as
the Divinity itself whence it had birth.  Each nation, each people, each
city adopts at its liking, those of the divine faculties which are best
suited to its character and its requirements.  These faculties, represented
by simulacra, become so many particular gods whose variety of names augments
the number still further.  Nothing can limit this immense theogony, since
the Primal Cause whence it emanates has not done so.  The vulgar, lured by
the objects which strike the senses, can become idolatrous, and he does
ordinarily; he can even distinguish these objects of his adoration, one from
another, and believe that there really exist as many gods as statues; but
the sage, the philosopher, the most ordinary man of letters does not fall
into this error.  He knows, with Plutarch, that different places and names
do not make different gods; that the Greeks and Barbarians, the nations of
the North and those of the South, adore the same Divinity; he restores
easily that infinity of attributes to the unity of the essence, and as the
honoured remnants of the ancient Sramanas, the priests of the Burmans, still
do today, he worships God, whatever may be the altar, the temple, and the
place where he finds himself.
    This is what was done by the disciples of Pythagoras, according to the
commandment of their master; they saw in the gods of the nations, the
attributes of the Ineffable Being which were forbidden them to name; they
augmented ostensibly and without the slightest reluctance, the number of
these attributes of which they recognized the Infinite cause; they gave
homage to the cult consecrated by the law and brought them all back secretly
to the Unity which was the object of their faith.

                            -Fabre D'Olivet