Timing is important in understanding the various forces that seek to destroy God's sovereignty.
The 19th century was filled with support for all kinds of supernatural, esoteric drivel.
The United States was becoming a world power. Certain European forces sought to undermine the energetic, resourceful Reformed tradition that spawned this country and provided its industrious work ethic.
This ethic had been based on the Calvinist/Puritan concept that "work" was righteous in the eyes of God when it's done for His glory. And also on the belief that the earth was a good and Godly place, because it was created by God for His pleasure; our job being to make it into a better place to reflect God's glory.
Enter the naturalists, the theosophists, the socialists, the Fabians, the spiritualists, the social psychologists, and various liberal denominations, like the Unitarians, all singing in the same choir of universalism.
They each shared the pagan notion that man possesses "a spark of God within him." And this error goes right along with the idea that God could stop being God and become simply a man. Because if "simply a man" can really be a man who changes into a God, so should we be able to morph into that "divinity" which is "naturally inside us."
The hard and eternal truth is that God is God and man is man, and the two are as differentiated as the "Sculptor" is from his "clay."
It's no coincidence that those who built this country were strict Predestinarians. As the country has moved away from its founders' belief in a sovereign God, it has drifted into metaphysical mumbo-jumbo, horoscopes and Oprah.