When the world evolved to such a stage that a believer in God was able to see even in the idol his God, and communicate with Him by the power of his faith, then came the next lesson for the faithful, which one sees in the series of Prophets coming one after the other to Beni Israel. From Abraham to Moses, from Moses to Christ, the lesson came which culminated in the Message of Muhammed. The idea was to learn the next lesson--of turning the idol into an ideal rising from the worship of form to the abstract: By prayer, by praising the Lord, by glorifying His name, by contemplating upon His attributes, by admiring His righteousness, and by realizing His goodness, man created his God in his heart. Idolatry was meant for this, but it was the first lesson; the second was to free one's mind from the form; since there are numerous forms, and when God is recognized in one form, then all other forms are left out, being recognized as His forms also.

Man has in his nature a weakness, and that is that when anything is given to him for his good, and when he likes it, he becomes attached to it until he gets its bad results; and, once he is attached, he never wishes to leave it. If a physician gives a drug to his patient and the patient likes it, he indulges in it, and wishes to continue it, until, instead of a medicine for his cure, it turns into a vice for his destruction. So idolatry became a vice, until the Messengers had to fight it and break it with the hammer. But in cases where it has remained as a first lesson, it has made a great improvement, and has made people much more capable of receiving the second lesson of the God-Ideal, which for many has been difficult to learn.