[2] Before the Mohammedan religion existed, idolatrous worship was spread over very many of the world's kingdoms. The reason was that all the churches which existed before the Lord's coming were representative ones. This is what the Israelite church was: its tabernacle, Aaron's vestments, sacrifices, every detail of the Temple in Jerusalem, as well as its laws, had some representative meaning. Ancient peoples too possessed a knowledge of correspondences, which are also representative, regarding this as the highest form of knowledge; it was particularly developed by the Egyptians and formed the basis of their hieroglyphs. It was this knowledge which enabled them to know the meaning of every kind of animal, every kind of tree, the meanings of mountains, hills, rivers and springs, of the sun, the moon and the stars. This knowledge was the means by which they knew about spiritual matters. For the things they represented, which are the kind of things that make up the spiritual wisdom possessed by angels in heaven, were the origins of these objects.

[3] Now because all their worship was representative, being composed of nothing but correspondences, they practised their worship on mountains and hills, as well as in woods and gardens. For this reason too they regarded springs as sacred, as well as keeping carved images of horses, cattle, calves, lambs, even birds, fishes and snakes. They set these beside their temples and in the forecourts of these and of their houses, arranging them according to the spiritual ideas of the church to which they corresponded, for these are what they represented or meant. In later times when the knowledge of correspondences had been wiped out, their descendants began to worship the actual carvings as being themselves holy, being unaware that their ancestors had seen no holiness in them, merely regarding them as representing holy things in accordance with their correspondences. This was the origin of the idolatries which filled so many of the world's kingdoms.

[4] In order to root out those idolatries, it happened by the Lord's Divine Providence that a new religion should be founded adapted to suit the character of oriental peoples. In it there should be something from both the Testaments of the Word, and it should teach that the Lord came into the world, and that He was a very great prophet, the wisest of them all, and the Son of God. This was accomplished through Mohammed, who gave the religion his name. This makes it plain that this religion was developed of the Lord's Divine Providence, and, as I said, adapted to suit the character of oriental peoples, with the object of wiping out the idolatrous practices of so many nations, and of conveying to them some knowledge about the Lord before they arrived in the spiritual world, as happens after death. It could not have been accepted by so many kingdoms and have rooted out their idolatries, if it had not been in keeping with the ideas they thought about; and in particular, unless polygamy had been permitted, because without that permission oriental peoples would more than Europeans have been fired with lust for foul adulteries, and would have perished.