Saltus, Edgar: The Lords of the Ghostland, v1, 14 March 2010.
 

Edgar Saltus [1855–1921]
The Lords of the Ghostland: A History of the Ideal [1907]

A history of the concept of god.

The opening passage:
The ideal is the essence of poetry. In the virginal innocence of the world, poetry was a term that meant discourse of the gods. A world grown grey has learned to regard the gods as diseases of language. Conceived, it may be, in fevers of fancy, perhaps, originally, they were but deified words. Yet, it is as children of beauty and of dream that they remain.
“Mortal has made the immortal,” the Rig-Veda explicitly declares. The making was surely slow. In tracing the genealogy of the divine, it has been found that its root was fear. The root, dispersed by light, ultimately dissolved.