Christianity and Mythology E-Book

John M. Robertson

• Herausgeber: Jazzybee Verlag
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 909

Beschreibung

The three treatises making up this volume stand for a process of inquiry which began to take written form in the 1870s. It set out with a certain scientific principle and a certain historical purpose: the principle being that Christian origins should be studied with constant precaution against the common assumption that all myths of action and doctrine must be mere accretions round the biography of a great teacher, broadly figured by "the" Gospel Jesus; while the practical purpose was to exhibit " The Rise of Christianity, Sociologically Considered." To that end thr author was prepared to assume a primitive cult, arising in memory of a teacher with twelve disciples. But the first independent explorations, the first rigorous attempts to identify the first Jesuists, led to a series of fresh exposures of myth. " Jesus of Nazareth " turned out to be a compound of an already composite Gospel Jesus, an interposed Jesus the Nazarite, and a superimposed Jesus born at Nazareth. And none of the three aspects equated with the primary Jesus of Paul. Each in turn was, in Paul's words, " another Jesus whom we have not preached." And the Twelve Apostles were demonstrably mythical.

Leseprobe

Christianity and Mythology

JOHN M. ROBERTSON

Christianity and Mythology, John M. Robertson

Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck

86450 Altenmünster, Loschberg 9

Deutschland

ISBN: 9783849663056

www.jazzybee-verlag.de

[email protected]

CONTENTS:

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.. 1

INTRODUCTION.. 6

PART I. THE PROGRESS OF MYTHOLOGY.. 12

CHAPTER I. THE SCIENCE AND ITS HISTORY.. 12

CHAPTER II. MODERN SYSTEMS. 24

CHAPTER III. THE SEPARATIST FALLACY.. 48

CHAPTER IV. THE STAND FOR THE BIBLE.. 88

PART II. CHRIST AND KRISHNA.. 122

PART III. THE GOSPEL MYTHS. 232

PREAMBLE.. 232

FIRST DIVISION: MYTHS OF ACTION... 245

SECOND DIVISION: MYTHS OF DOCTRINE.320

APPENDIX THE NEO-UNITARIAN POSITION.366

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

OTHER avocations have made difficult the due revision of this book in the light of the manifold hierological discussion of the past ten years. Since, however, I have seen no reason to give up any of its main contentions, and the growing interest in the central problem is expressed by the demand for a new edition, I have made shift to improve and expand it at the many points that had obtruded themselves for fuller consideration in the course of my general reading. And there is the further reason for removing the " out-of-print " bar under which the book has lately lain, that, latterly as formerly, its most prominent theological critics are industrious in misrepresenting its positions. In this respect neo-Unitarians and Trinitarians seem to be at one.

For instance, Professor A. Réville, reviewing the book in the Revue de I'histoire des religions, in 1902, wrote (p. 276): —

It will not be exacted from us that we should follow the English author from one end of his book to the other. That would involve the making of another, as large. We have sought simply to sketch the impressions which he leaves upon us. It is in particular the mythology and the legend of Krishna that he loves to present as one of the principal sources of the evangelical myth or myths. Well, this is very far-fetched (bien loin et bien forcé). Why make such journeys when, in order to indicate the possible source of legendary elements in the canonical narrative, one could seek it without going past Palestine, or at least Semitism?

It would doubtless be Quixotic to demand of a professional theologian that he should read a book through before condemning it; but it seems difficult so to differentiate the moral standards of the theologian and the layman as to entitle him to frame his censures without reading it at all. Professor Réville had shaped his criticism in entire ignorance of the thesis even of the second part, to which he expressly referred. So far from representing the Krishna legend as one of the principal sources of the gospel myths, it suggests such a possibility or probability only in the case of one or two subsidiary details. Its main thesis is that the Christian writings cannot be a main source of the Krishna myth — a very different proposition. If Professor Réville had even glanced at the third part, entitled " The Gospel Myths," he would have been deterred from his egregious allegation. Had he gone through it, he would have found not a single positive assertion, and only one or two qualified suggestions, of derivation of minor details from Krishnaism. He would doubtless remain convinced that the proposed derivations from nearer sources were fallacious; but he could scarcely have retained his preliminary belief that the unread treatise declared the main source to be India. In point of fact, he framed his indictment upon a wrong guess.

A layman who is puzzled by the standards of critical morality revealed in such a performance as that of Professor Réville may perhaps find a gleam of elucidation in another deliverance, by the Rev. Canon J. A. MacCulloch, D.D., author of a primer on Religion: its Origin and Forms, a manual on Comparative Theology, and other works of an ostensibly scientific cast. In a lecture on " Comparative Religion [sic] and the Historic Christ " in the collection entitled Religion and the Modern World (lectures delivered before the Glasgow University Society of St. Ninian), 1909, Canon MacCulloch does me the honour, in one section, to " propose to confine " himself to " some " of my arguments, and thereupon proceeds to speak of me as a" school," of which he gives this among other details of description (pp. 151-2): —

Their antagonism to Christianity is seen in this, that they seem willing to apologise for and to prove the originality of every other form of religion. While scholars of repute have suggested that, e.g., the cult of Krishna in India or much of the story of Balder in Scandinavia may have been borrowed from Christian sources, the rationalist angrily asserts that this is impossible, and that Christianity has itself borrowed from the impure cult of Krishna. But if such a world-wide religion as Christianity has been so arrant a borrower, we may well ask why all borrowings from it should be so incredible.

If Canon MacCulloch had not been himself so angry as not only to feel that all his antagonists must be so, but to be unable to follow their arguments, he would have been aware (1) that in this volume the Voluspa Saga is expressly admitted to have been coloured by Christian influences; (2) that, as aforesaid, the Krishna story is indicated as a possible source of Christian myth only at one or two subsidiary points; (3) that Buddhism is declared to have borrowed freely from Krishnaism, and many ancient cults to have assimilated others; (4) that the probability of a deluge-myth among the Mexicans being derived from missionary teaching is conceded; and (5) that the argument contains this express avowal: "as Christism borrowed myths of all kinds from Paganism, so it may pass on myths to less developed systems." Any layman will of course see that every alleged case must be considered on its merits; and it is the dispassionate critical handling of the two cases named by him that has reduced Canon MacCulloch to a state of mind in which, like Professor Réville, he transcends ordinary standards of literary morals. It would thus appear that odium theologicum can operate to-day very much as of old. The professional theologian reproduces the psychic phenomena of the state of war: he cannot refrain from inventing charges against his opponent.

In the Appendix in which I have dealt with the arguments of some of the leading writers who maintain, from a historical and variously heterodox point of view, the contrary position to my own, I hope to have at least escaped the snare of misrepresentation. But I am not so presumptuous as to suppose that in the handling of this far-reaching controversy I have escaped fallacy or reached finality. Expanding experience in various fields of discussion reveals more fully to some of us the difficulty of putting any innovating theory of wide scope at all forcibly without seeming to rely at times more on emphasis than on reasoning. And this difficulty, it may well be, has not always been overcome in the following pages. On the other hand, it seems to be at times too great for the dialectic powers of distinguished exponents of conservative views in these matters. When even Dr. Frazer, who has had some experience in arousing conservative resistance, can offer nothing better than a headlong petitio principii as ground for rejecting a theory that applies his own theoretic principles where he is not disposed to apply them, it is not surprising to find Dr. Sanday and Dr. Carpenter, with their theological consciousness of special enlightenment, undertaking to dispose of unsettling doctrines by the oracular modes of the profession. Dr. Sanday, disturbed by neologism, threateningly reminds us that " human nature " will not endure more than a certain amount of such disturbance; though at other times his normal benevolence prompts him to credit with " mother wit " some of those who presume to impugn his creed. A little of that useful endowment might seem sufficient to make him realize that human nature can be claimed by all of us, and that in that field at least there can be no monopoly and no precedence.

As regards scholarship, again, culture history is but a record of its inadequacy in the absence of scientific " mother wit." Everyone of the thousand abandoned fortresses of theology had been walled by libraries of learning. Hence a somewhat obvious futility in undertakings to ban new theorists by blank imputations of incompetence. Dr. Carpenter, for instance, undertakes to decide difficult historical problems by telling heretics like myself that they do not know the moaning of evidence, and lack the historical sense, and that he possesses the required gifts. Dr. Frazer at a pinch resorts to the same simple procedure. After reading a good deal of history I am disposed to admit that the " historical sense " can vary greatly in individuals in point of delicacy and accuracy; and I am as sensible of psychic shortcomings on the part of my critics as they can be of mine; but I do not see that anything is settled, save for the already convinced, by the exchange of such assurances. The open-minded reader, I trust, would no more take as decisive my estimate of Dr. Carpenter's faculty for weighing evidence than he will take Dr. Carpenter's bare dictum against me. To open-minded readers in general I will only suggest that every new reading of the past, whether of man or of Nature, has been at its inception denounced as stupid; that the standing hindrance to the right use of the historical sense is prepossession; and that prepossessions about religions, deities, and revered personages are in the nature of things apt to be nearly absolute.

In every age the average man — under which class I include the average expert — is structurally unable to accept radically innovating ideas. For a century and a half he could not accept Copernicanism. When Copernicanism and the Newtonian system had been generally assimilated, the old resistance was renewed in the case of geology; and when that science, in turn, had been at length established, the mob of average minds raged in the old fashion against Darwin. Their worthless judgments are always held and delivered with the same furious confidence; and with the same sense of intellectual superiority they pronounce the same verdicts of incapacity against each innovator in turn. Their incapacity, obviously, is no argument for the truth of the new theory, which may as easily be wrong as right; but if anything can reasonably be held to demonstrate radical incompetence for the ascertaining of scientific truth, it is precisely this confidence in prejudice, and the accompanying inability to argue without ascription of primary incapacity to the opponent. He who realizes the dissolution that has taken place within a hundred years of many beliefs held by tenure alike of intuition and of supposed historical proof, will surely be slow to rely on his mere habit of certitude against a serious challenge to any one of his historical convictions. For my own part I have at least diffidence enough to be still on the look-out for fuller or better elucidations of a number of the problems here handled.

To that end, I am tempted to add to the first part of the present volume some account of the developments of mythological research as set forth in Professor 0. Gruppe's book of 1908, Die mythologische Literatur aus den Jahren 1898-1905; but refrain on the ground that the following treatise never professed to be a manual of mythological science, but aimed simply at bringing the methods of mythology to bear on surviving as well as on dead religion; and that this purpose is sufficiently served without undertaking to follow up all the mythological research of the time. The inclusion of living matter within the scope of mythology is still the pressing problem; and it is probably overloaded already, for some readers, with discussions of mythological issues which stand apart. I may, however, remind the reader that further developments of the problem are undertaken in the treatise entitled Pagan Christs, which followed the present book, and of which a new and expanded edition is now in preparation.

Meantime I have pleasure in calling attention to certain works which tell of much new and vigorous activity over these problems in the great intellectual workshop of Germany. There also, of course, conservative theologians resort to the argumentum ad hominem in its more elementary forms. Thus, in the noteworthy discussion on the problem "Did Jesus Live?" held under the auspices of the German Society of Monists (Monistenbund) at Berlin on January 31st and February 1st, 1910, over a paper by Professor Dr. Arthur Drews, of Carlsruhe, entitled Is Jesus a Historical Personality? I find Professor D. H. Pfarrer von Soden disposing of my unworthy self as " an Englishman (not the celebrated one) who has no great name among us." I may be permitted to offer the rev. professor my condolences on the fact that he is under a similar drawback in England, and to express the hope that both of us may nevertheless continue to hold up our heads. The important thing is that the discussion under notice has aroused the mind of Germany. The first edition of the report, consisting of ten thousand copies, was sold out in little more than a month; and its theme was discussed in hundreds of meetings, innumerable journals, and a multitude of pamphlets. This unexampled ferment results proximately from the publication of the remarkable book by Dr. Drews entitled Die Christusmythe (1st ed. Jena, 1909; 3rd ed. 1910), which, following on the notable works of the late Pastor Kalthoff, has irresistibly forced the question of the historicity of Jesus upon the attention alike of scholars and laymen in Germany. Whatever may be the outcome, the problem is now definitely present to the German theological world. Other treatises, such as the meritorious little book of Dr. Martin Brückner, Der sterbende und auferstehende Gottheiland in den orientalischen Religionen und ihr Verhältnis zum Cristenthum in the " Religionsgeschichtliche Volksbücher" series (Tübingen, 1908), present it judicially; and the pamphlet of Arthur Bohtlingk, Zur Aufhellung der Christusmythologie (Frankfurt am Main, 1910), sets forth the relation of the new theorem to the critical movement of the past century.

In England we do not move so fast. Here also, however, " it moves." Ignored by most theologians, the problem is faced by some, however cavalierly; and the light comes "not through eastern windows only," so to speak. Whatever may be the fate of the theorem propounded in this book and in Pagan Christs, orthodoxy has small prospect of peaceful possession before it. The work of Dr. Albert Schweitzer entitled The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of its Progress from Beimarus to Wrede, to the English translation of which (1910; A. and C. Black) Professor F. C. Burkitt, D.D., has contributed a preface, is considerably further removed from the traditional belief than from this negation thereof.

I can but express my satisfaction that the line of argument followed by me is in fundamental agreement with, and is at vital points strengthened by, that of Professor Drews, and that of the important treatise of Dr. W. B. Smith on Der Vorchristliche Jesus (Giessen, 1906), which first systematically set forth the case for the thesis of its title. The fact that Professor Schmiedel thought that treatise worthy of a preface from him may suffice to countervail the dialectic which would dismiss it as an idle hypothesis.

In preparing the present edition I am deeply indebted to my friend Mr. Percy Vaughan for carefully reading the proofs and revising the index.

July, 1910.

INTRODUCTION

The three treatises making up this volume stand for a process of inquiry which began to take written form nearly twenty-five years ago. It set out with a certain scientific principle and a certain historical purpose: the principle being that Christian Origins should be studied with constant precaution against the common assumption that all myths of action and doctrine must be mere accretions round the biography of a great teacher, broadly figured by "the" Gospel Jesus; while the practical purpose was to exhibit " The Rise of Christianity, Sociologically Considered." To that end I was prepared to assume a primitive cult, arising in memory of a teacher with twelve disciples. But the first independent explorations, the first rigorous attempts to identify the first Jesuists, led to a series of fresh exposures of myth. " Jesus of Nazareth " turned out to be a compound of an already composite Gospel Jesus, an interposed Jesus the Nazarite, and a superimposed Jesus born at Nazareth. And none of the three aspects equated with the primary Jesus of Paul. Each in turn was, in Paul's words, " another Jesus whom we have not preached." And the Twelve Apostles were demonstrably mythical.

While, therefore, a sociological foundation was in a measure reached, it was plain that the ground had not yet been cleared of mythology; and at that stage I even surmised that, in view of the known frequency alike of Messiahs and Jesuses in Jewry, an actual succession of Jesuses might be the historical solution. Such a theorem represented a still imperfect appreciation of the scope and dominion of the principle of Myth; and it fitly chanced that the sociological inquiry was arrested for a time as a literary task, though continued as a study.

Soon after, at the request of the late Mr. Bradlaugh, I undertook the research concerning "Christ and Krishna" by way of solving scientifically and objectively a simpler general problem in mythology and hierology; and about the same time the undertaking of an independent research into Mithraism further enabled me to see the Christian problem in a fuller scientific light. Thus the original inquiry, never discontinued as a subject of thought, led gradually to a conception of Mythology as a more catholic science, or a more scientific classification of certain knowledge, than it has yet been shown to be in the hands of its cultivators, admirable as much of their work is. That view I have now tried to set forth critically and historically in the opening treatise on " The Progress of Mythology." The study on " Christ and Krishna," which first appeared serially in Mr. Bradlaugh's journal and was reprinted (1889) with additions and corrections, is now again a good deal expanded, and in parts rewritten. It seeks on one hand to illustrate, in detail, what seems to me the right method of dealing with certain problems glanced at in the opening treatise; and on the other hand to lead organically into the general problem of Christian mythology. Finally, the survey of " The Gospel Myths," portions of which were also published serially, is recast and greatly enlarged, by way of finally clearing the mythological ground for sociology "proper."

As regards the theoretic problem, I cannot better prepare a reader to catch my point of view than by indicating it critically as against the diverging doctrine of the work of Dr. Percy Gardner entitled Exploratio Evangelica (1899), a treatise in many respects wise and stimulating, which came into my hands only when the bulk of this volume was in type. As I regard it, Dr. Gardner's treatise relies unduly on the old, untested, metaphysical conception of mythology. Consider, for instance, the proposition that " probably at that time [early Christian age] in all the Levant the true mythmaking age was over. But the faculties which had been employed in the construction of myth were still at work. And they found their natural field in the adaptation of history to national and ethical purpose." Such language seems to me to confute itself: in any case, the whole drift of the present work is a gainsaying of such divisions as the one thus sought to be drawn. Dr. Gardner speaks again of " the vague and childish character of the true myth." I submit that there are all degrees of vagueness and childishness in myth, from the grossest to the slightest, even in the pre-Christian lore of Greece, and that though there may be grading there can be no scientific sunderance. A myth commonly so-called, when all is said, is simply a false hypothesis (whether framed in bad faith or in good faith) which once found easy credence; and when inadequate or illusory hypotheses find acceptance in our own time, we see exemplified at once the play of the myth-making faculty and that of the normal credulity on which it lives.

Over a generation ago Adalbert Kuhn, one of the pioneers of modern mythology in Germany, in his lecture at Berlin, Ueber Entwichelungstufen der Mythenbildung, denied that there had been any one "true" or sole mythical period, and affirmed that the mythopoetic faculty simply varies and evolves. Professor Angelo de Gubernatis, in the concluding lecture of his course at Florence on Vedic Mythology, while giving a general assent, stipulated that there is a great difference between the ancient classic or Vedic and the modern — even the modern savage — myth, in respect of the ancient combination of ignorance with abundance of language. But this is to admit that the differentiation is mainly in terms of knowledge, and to exclude Dr. Gardner's distinction between the " true " mythmaking age B.C. and that which followed. There was probably more scientific thinking in the Greek-speaking world in the period from Thales to Aristotle than in the greater part of it during the period between Augustus and the nineteenth century. Nay, the rural population of Greece to-day is mentally nearer the myth-making stage than was the educated part of the Athens of Pericles; and the Catholic peasantry of southern Europe has been pretty much at the same standpoint down till the other day. True, modern science makes impossible the old easy mythopoiesis among people scientifically instructed; but even in the "educated" world of to-day, to say nothing of the survival of belief in Christian myths, or of the rise of the Mormon cult in the civilized United States, we see mythopoiesis at work among the educated followers of Madame Blavatsky and of Mrs. Eddy. And there is only a tint of psychic difference, so to speak, between their mental processes and those which avail to secure the currency of any fallacious belief in politics or in science.

Any "explanation" which is but an a priori formula to account for an uncomprehended and unanalyzed process of phenomena is a " true myth " in so far as it finds utterance and acceptance. Some myths are less fortuitous, more purposive, than others; and a question might fairly be raised as to whether there is not here a true psychological distinction. My answer is that we can never demonstrate the entire absence of purpose: it is always a question of degree; and it makes little scientific difference in our elucidation whether we impute more or less of ignorant good faith, provided we recognize variation. A quite primitive myth may have been a conscious fiction on the part of its first framer; but the credulity of its acceptors assimilated it in exactly the same way as others framed in better faith.

Even if, however, we restricted ourselves to false hypotheses framed in absolute good faith, the old conception of myth remains a stumbling-block to be got rid of. It obscures our comprehension of the psychological process even of myths commonly so-called. Dr. Gardner, for instance, writes that " the Phoenician kinsmen of the Jews retained down to quite late times the terrible custom of human sacrifice. Its abolition very early among the Hebrews was a mark of their unique religious consciousness, and a sign of their lofty destiny." This proposition — to say nothing of the serious historic error as to a "very early" disappearance of human sacrifice among the Hebrews — I should describe as the quasi-explanation of an uncomprehended process in terms of the phenomena themselves; as in the propositions that opium has a dormitive virtue, and that nature abhors a vacuum. And such explanations, I submit, so far as they are accepted, are myths, made very much in the old way, though with far higher intellectual faculties. Even as the movement of the sun and planets was not scientifically accounted for by supposing them to be tenanted by Gods or guiding spirits, so the evolution of a community and its culture is not accounted for by crediting the community with "unique consciousness" and "lofty destiny." The old explanation was a myth; the other is only myth on a different plane of instruction.

The effect of this change of theoretic standpoint must needs be considerable, at least as regards phraseology. I will merely say that, conceiving myth thus comprehensively, I have sought to track and elucidate it by lines of evidence not usually made to co-operate. Myth in the gospels, on the view here taken, is to be detected not merely by means of the data of comparative mythology, but also by means of analysis of the texts. As Baur argued long ago, from criticism of the history we must come to criticism of the documents. But the later criticism of the documents, prepossessed by old conceptions of myth, has often made little account of concrete mythology, and has so fallen back on Hegelian formulas — that is, on philosophical myths — where real solutions were quite feasible. At the same time, students of mythology have often taken myth for biography, for lack of analysis of the texts. As illustrating my idea of what is to be gained by the concurrent use of both procedures, I may point to the subsections of Part III, " The Gospel Myths," dealing with (a) the Myth of the Temptation, and (b) the Myth of the Upbringing at Nazareth. The first undertakes to trace an ostensibly fortuitous myth by various methods of comparative mythology, in particular by colligating clues in art and in literature; the second undertakes to trace a relatively purposive myth by analysis of the texts which gradually construct it, leaving part of the problem of the motives, in the latter case, for a wider historical inquiry. And here we have cases which test the old theory of myth — Baur's and Dr. Gardner's conception of " the true myth." The first myth, we say, is ostensibly fortuitous, the second ostensibly purposive. But neither assumption is susceptible of proof. The first myth, in its Christian aspect, may have originated in a deliberate fiction by a priest who gave what he knew to be a false explanation of a picture or sculpture; the second may have originated in good faith, with a theorist who did not believe that the first Christian Nazarenes were so called in the sense of Nazarites. In fine, what makes a myth " truly " so is not the state of mind of the man who first framed it, but the state of mind of those who adopted it. And that state of mind is simply uncritical credulity.

It may be that in some process of textual criticism in the treatise on " The Gospel Myths " I have unknowingly put forward theses already advanced by other critics. The German literature in that department is so immense that I have not sought to compass even the bulk of it, having read a good deal with little decisive gain. Much of it is a mere prolongation of dispute over the more problematical, leaving the less problematical line of demonstration unoccupied. It seems in every way more profitable to put the case afresh from my own standpoint, on the lines of my own chosen approach, which is the result or sequel of a survey of previous methods; and to do this without even criticizing a whole series of such methods which strike me as finally fallacious. Not that they were not meritorious in their circumstances: on the contrary, they frequently convey a melancholy impression of a great expenditure of intellectual power to no effectual end. In comparing Bruno Bauer, for instance, with "safe" modern practitioners like Bernhard Weiss, one cannot but be struck by the greater originality and acuteness of the free-lance. But the bulk of the work of Bruno Bauer was practically thrown away by reason of his false Hegelian or quasi-Hegelian method; for he is more Hegelian than Strauss, and constantly frames his solutions in terms of the more problematical rather than in terms of the less. Every phenomenon in the text is by him accounted for through an a priori abstraction of the constructive consciousness of the early Christian community, acting as it theoretically needs must; so that we get psychological and sociological myth in place of theological. The negation is right; the affirmation is wrong.

Broadly speaking, such work as Bruno Bauer's, and much of that of Strauss, answers to Comte's conception of the normal rise of a metaphysical mode of thought as the first departure from a theological; this though Bauer thought that he and Weisse and Wilke and others had reached the true " positive " standpoint. The truth is that none of us — certainly not Comte — could make the transition so promptly as he supposed himself to have done; at best we grow less and less metaphysical (or, as I should prefer to put it, less apriorist), more and more " positive." This appears even in the weighty performance of F. C. Baur, a more " positive " thinker and investigator than Bruno Bauer, whose error of method he exposed with perfect precision. Common prudence, therefore, dictates the admission that the method of the following treatises is likely to suffer in some degree from survivals of the " metaphysical" tendency. I claim only that, so far as it goes, it is in general more " positive," more inductive, less a priori, more obedient to scientific canons, than that of the previous critics known to me who have reached similar anti-traditional results. It substitutes an anthropological basis, in terms of the concrete phenomena of mythology, for a pseudo-philosophical presupposition.

That this will give it any advantage as against the ecclesiastical defence would be too much to look for. I have suggested that that defence represents, however unconsciously, the organization of an economic interest; that the ostensible course of criticism is not a matter of the logical evolution of discovery, as in a disinterested science, but of the social selection of types of teacher. No stronger brain than Baur has dealt with historical theology in Germany since his day: either through their own choice of other careers or the official selection of other candidates, the stronger German brains have mostly wrought in other fields. So, in the Church of England, we see no continuous advance in the application of clerical ability, from Milman onwards, to the problems of Christian Origins. If the capable men are there, they are mostly gagged or obstructed. The late Dr. Edwin Hatch, the one Churchman save Dr. Cheyne who in our time has done original and at the same time valid and important service in that field, appears to have been in a measure positively ostracized in his profession, though the sale of his works shows their wide acceptability even within its limits. The corporate interest and organization avail to override unorganized liberalism, there as elsewhere.

When then Dr. Percy Gardner, writing as a layman, avows that he cannot hope " to escape the opposition and anger which have always greeted any attempt to apply to the Christian creed the principles which are applied freely to other forms of faith," I may well count on a worse if more cursory reception for a book which in places represents him as unwarrantably conservative of tradition. Such treatises properly appeal to serious and open-minded laymen. Unfortunately the open-minded laity are in large part satisfied to think that traditionalism is discredited, and so take up an attitude of indifference to works which any longer join issue with it. None the less, those who realize the precariousness of modern gains in the battle against the tyranny of the past must continue the campaign, so doing what they can to save the optimists from, it may be, a rude awakening.

PART I. THE PROGRESS OF MYTHOLOGY

Chapter I. THE SCIENCE AND ITS HISTORY

§ 1. The Problem.

THERE are stages in the history of every science when its progress can be seen to consist in applying to its subject-matter a wider conception of relations. Scientific progress, indeed, mainly consists in such resorts to larger syntheses. In Geology, as Mr. Spencer points out, " when the igneous and aqueous hypotheses were united, a rapid advance took place "; in Biology progress came through "the fusion of the doctrine of types with the doctrine of adaptations "; and in Psychology, similarly, an evolutionary conception partly harmonized the doctrines of the Lockian and Kantian schools. It is true that Mr. Spencer proceeds to turn the generalization to the account of his theorem of a " Reconciliation " between " Religion " and " Science," on a ground which he declares to be outside both — that is, to belong to no science whatever. Nevertheless, the general proposition as above illustrated is just; and there is an obvious presumption that it will hold good of any science in particular.

It is proposed in the present inquiry to try whether the renewed application of the principle may not give light and leading in the science — if we can agree so to call it — of mythology. By some the title may be positively withheld, on the ground that mythology so-called is seen in recent discussions to be only a collection of certain lore, to which are applied conflicting theories; and it is not to be denied that there is enough of conflict and confusion to give colour to such an account of the matter. But inasmuch as there has been progress in course of centuries towards scientific agreement on certain classifications of the phenomena; and as this progress can be shown to consist in successive extensions of the relations under which they are contemplated, there is reason to conclude that mythology is a science like another, though latterly retarded more than others by the persistence of pre-scientific assumptions.

Myth, broadly speaking, is a form of traditionary error; and while the definition of mythology turns upon the recognition of the special form, the bane of the science has been the more or less complete isolation of it in thought from all the other forms. The best analogy for our purpose is perhaps not any of those cited from Mr. Spencer, but rather the case of Astronomy, where Newton's great hypothesis was by way of seeing planetary motions as cases of motion in general. Any form of traditionary error, it seems clear, must occur in terms of the general conditions of traditionary error; and such error in general must be conceived in terms of men's efforts at explanation or classification of things in general, at successive stages of thought. Yet in our own time, under the ostensible reign of Naturalism, after ages in which men looked at myth from a point of view that made almost invisible the psychological continuity between myth-makers' mental processes and their own, we find accomplished students of the science still much occupied in setting up walls of utter division between the mythopoeic and all other mental processes; between the different aspects of early classification; between the aspects of myth; between myth and " religion," religion and magic, myth and early morals, myth and legend, myth and allegory, myth and tradition, myth and supernaturalist biography. If past scientific experience can yield us any guidance, it would seem that such a tendency is frustrative of scientific progress.

§ 2. The Scientific Beginnings.

Gains there have certainly been, in the last half century. When we compare its results with those of the previous ten or even four centuries, as sketched in the Introduction a l' etude de la mythologie of Emeric-David, we must admit a considerable progress; though if we should chronicle as he did the backward treatises as well as the others we could make a rather checkered narrative. The definite gain is that the naturalist method, often broached but not accepted before our time, is now nearly though not quite as generally employed in this as in the other sciences, whereas in past times there was an overpowering tendency to handle it from the point of view of that belief in " revelation " which so seriously vitiated the study of Greek mythology in the hands of Mr. Gladstone, the last eminent practitioner on the old basis. How effectively that belief has retarded this science in particular may be partly gathered from Emeric-David's historical sketch.

Beginning with Albric in the eighth century, Maimonides in the twelfth, and Boccaccio in the fourteenth, the learned academician makes out a list of between seventy and eighty scholarly writers on mythology down to Benjamin Constant. He might have extended the list to a hundred; but it is duly representative, save in that it oddly omits all mention of Fontenelle, whose essay Be Vorigine des fables, as Mr. Lang points out, substantially anticipated the modern anthropological and evolutionary point of view. This was of all previous treatises the one which could best have enlarged and rectified the French historian's own method, and he either overlooks or wilfully ignores it, taking note only of the rather one-sided view of the anthropological principle presented later by De Brosses and his disciple Benjamin Constant. It may be helpful at this point, however, to note the manner of the progression, as very fairly set forth in the main by Emeric-David, and in part by Karl Ottfried Müller in his earlier Prolegomena.

The movements of advance and reaction in the history of mythological science, then, may be thus summarily and formally stated.

1. In rationalistic antiquity, the principle of evolution was barely glimpsed; and on the one hand the professed mythologists aimed at multiplying symbolical or allegorical meanings rather than tracing development, while on the other the school of Evemeros framed a set of false "naturalistic" explanations, being equally devoid of the requisite historical knowledge. The mythologists sank the fabulous personalities of the Gods in symbols; the skeptics sank them in actual human personages.

2. A substantially scientific beginning was made by the late school which reduced the symbolism of the older schools to a recognition of the large part played by sun and moon in most systems. In the hands of Macrobius (4th c.) this key is applied very much on the lines of the modern solar theory, with results which are still in large part valid. But that step of science, like nearly every other, was lost under Christianity and the resurgence of barbarism.

3. The Christian Fathers, when not disposing of Pagan Gods as demons, had no thought save to ridicule the old mythologies, failing to realize the character of their own.

4. The scholars of the Renaissance recognized the principle of Nature-symbolism, as set forth by Macrobius; but when, in the sixteenth century, scholarship began to classify the details of the pagan systems, it had no general guiding principle, and did but accumulate data.

5. Bacon, who made symbolism his general principle of interpretation, applied it fancifully, slightly, and without method. Selden and others, with much wider knowledge, applied the old principle that the pagan deities were personalized nature-forces, as sun and moon. But others, as Leibnitz, Vossius, Bochart, and Mosheim, confused all by the theological presupposition (adopted from the ancient atheists) that the pagan deities were deified men, and by assuming further that the early life of antiquity was truly set forth only in the Bible.

6. Other earlier and later theologians, as Huet, though opposed by critical scholars such as Selden, Basnage, and Vico, went still further astray on the theory that pagan Gods were perversions of Biblical personages; and that all pagan theologies were perversions of an earlier monotheism. Such an application of comparative method as was made by Spencer of Cambridge (De Legibus Hebrceorum, 1685) was far in advance of the powers of assimilation of the time.

7. Skeptics like Bayle derided all explanations alike and ridiculed the hope of reaching any better.

8. New attempts were in large part a priori, and some went back to Evemerism — e.g., that of the Abbe Banier, who saw myth origins in perversions both of historical fact and of Biblical narratives. The sound theorem of personalized forces was reiterated by Vico and others, and that of savage origins was thrown out by Fontenelle, but the theological method and premisses overrode scientific views. Other rationalists failed to apply the clue of evolution from savagery, and wrongly staked all on purposive allegorizing; though in the field of hierology the Jesuit Lafitau clearly saw the connection between ancient and savage religious customs, even comparing Psalm 186 with the Death-song of a North American Indian at the stake.

9. The Naturalism of De Brosses (De culte des fétiches, 1760) was as noteworthy as that of Fontenelle, and, though necessarily unscientific at some points for lack of anthropological data, might have served as a starting point for new science. But even the deists of the time were not in general ready for it; and the Christians of course much less so. On the other hand, the great astronomical and symbolical system of Dupuis (chief work, 1795), an application of the theses and methods of Macrobius to the gospels and to the Apocalypse, did not account for the obscurer primitive elements of myth, though it rightly carried the mythological principle into the surviving religions. This was eloquently done also in the slighter but more brilliant work of Volney, Les Buines (1791), which proceeds on an earlier research by Dupuis. In England and Germany the deistic movement of the eighteenth century also led to the recognition of myths in the Old Testament.

10. In the same period, Heyne — whether or not profiting by Fontenelle — developed a view that was in large part scientific, recognizing that myth is " the infant language of the race," lacking "the morality and delicacy of a later age," and that in later periods early myths were embellished, altered, and poeticized. He radically erred, however, in assuming that the early myth-makers only provisionally albeit " necessarily " personified natural forces, and always knew that what they said had not really happened. On the other hand, while teaching that their myths came to be literally believed by posterity, he erred in ascribing to the Homeric bards a conception of these myths as pure symbol; this conception having originated with the theosophic priests of Asia and Egypt, whence it reached the post-Homeric Greek rationalists. Voss, opposing Heyne as he later did Creuzer, did not improve on Heyne's positions, leaning unduly to the belief that primeval man allegorized reflectively, and making too much of the otherwise valid theory of deified ancestors, later insisted on by Mr. Spencer.

11. A distinct advance in breadth of view was made by Buttmann, who purified Heyne's doctrine as to the essential primitiveness or aboriginality of typical myth, and freshly laid the foundations of Comparative Mythology. Recognizing that the same primitive mode of thinking could give rise to similar myths in different nations independently of intercourse, he called for a comprehensive collocation. Naturally, however, he thus made too little of the special local significance of many myths.

12. Creuzer, on the other hand, while rightly recognizing that personification was a fundamental law of early thought, nevertheless founded on the false assumption of a "pure monotheistic primitive religion," and so stressed the idea of reflective allegory as to obscure his own doctrine that primeval man personified forces quite spontaneously. Yet he introduced real clues — as that of the derivation of some myths from ritual, and that of verbal misconception, a theory later carried to excess by F. G. Welcker, and still later by Max Müller. He also noted the fact — fallaciously stressed by Mr. Lang in our own day — that the primitive mind made no such distinction between spirits and bodies as is made in later theology. Hermann, proceeding on similar fundamental lines, likewise conceived myth too much in terms of the constructive allegorizing of priesthoods, overlooking the spontaneous and relatively fantastic beginnings of savagery.

Alongside of these later German writers, whom he does not mention, Emeric-David does not innovate in any effective fashion. His own interpretative principle, further set forth in his treatise Jupiter (1832), is that laid down with caution but applied without any by Bacon — that myths are symbolical attempts to explain Nature; and to make his treatise broadly scientific it needed that he should have recognized how the principle of so-called fetichism, or the actual primitive personalizing of nature-forces, preceded and conditioned the systems which the writer handled as purposively symbolical, and symbolical only. The anthropological method had been indicated by Heyne, whose system he admitted to be " true at bottom"; but on this side he made no use of it. As it was, he partly rectified the bias towards a single astronomical point of view which narrows the great treatise of Dupuis, De Vorigine de tous les cultes. Concerning that, he rightly admitted that with all its limitations " it still constitutes the most luminous treatise that has been written on mythology"; and his own contribution may be said to have consisted in adding several wards to Dupuis's key, or new keys to Dupuis's two or three, letting it be seen that the old symbolical interpretation of nature was at once a simpler and a more complicated matter than Dupuis had supposed. At the same time, he made no attempt to carry on the great practical service of Dupuis and his school, the application of the pagan keys to the Christian religion but confines himself to the Greek.

The same thing falls to be said in some degree of the earlier Prolegomena of Karl Ottfried Müller (1828) , of which Emeric-David makes no mention, on his principle of not criticising living writers. But none the less had Müller brought to the study of Greek mythology a learning, a genius, and a method which give a really scientific character to his work. In the school of Dupuis he shows no interest, merely referring to Dupuis in an Appendix. Whether this came of policy or of non-acquaintance we cannot well divine; but it is much to be regretted that he thus failed to come in touch with the most vital problem of his study. On the other hand, he did much to clear up the scientific ground so far as he did go. One of the most intellectual and most alert German scholars of that great period, he brought to bear on all Greek matters an exact and critical knowledge such as had hardly ever before been vigilantly applied to mythology; and though he did not escape the bane of all pioneers — indefiniteness and self-contradiction — he did not a little to reduce previous confusions. Good samples of his services as a first-hand investigator are his statement of the grounds for holding that the complete myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus is late, and his analysis of the myth of the transformation of Callisto into a bear. In the latter case, by strict scrutiny of all the sources — a thing too seldom thought of before his day — he arrived at the clear demonstration that " Callisto is nothing else than the Goddess and her sacred animal combined in one idea," and that Callisto became a bear, in the original legend, for this reason only, that the animal was sacred to Arcadian Artemis." The subsequent ascertainment that a bear-Goddess, Artio, was anciently worshipped at Berne, is a memorable vindication of Müller's insight. His deficiency on the concrete side appears in the same connection, when he observes that to Artemis as a Nature-Goddess "the most powerful creatures in nature, such as the bear, were sacred." This is unduly vague, and leaves us asking, in the light of later anthropology, whether the bear is not traceable further, and, in the light even of previous explanation, whether the bear was not after all associated with the Goddess because of the verbal resemblance between the names arktos (bear) and Artemis, or whether the latter name is not a mere development from the former. Of the principle of totemism, which traces many animal worships to a motive independent of any selection of "powerful" types, Müller had not learned to take account. As regards general principles, Ottfried Müller is perhaps only at two points open to serious criticism. He rightly controverted the view, implicit in Dupuis and explicit in Creuzer (though Creuzer also implied the contrary), that systematic symbolism and allegory were the main and primary sources of myth; arguing with Schelling that myths were at the outset essentially spontaneous and unartificial. At the same time, when dealing with the substantially sound thesis of Heyne, that "the my thus [in its early forms] was the infant language of the race," and that " poverty and necessity are its parents," he is led by his passion for classical antiquity to put an unreasonably flat contradiction, and thus seems to set his face against the fundamental truth that all religion begins in savagery. Thus he inconsistently lays stress on the conscious moral purpose of the myth of Zeus and Lycaon, which he holds to be very early, while disregarding the immorality of others, both earlier and later. The difficulty becomes acute when, making a needless verbal strife over the term " allegory," he insists that, if a certain worship were " allegorical in the strict sense, it could be no worship at all." He goes on: " Here we have to deal with a mode of contemplating the world which is quite foreign to our notions, and in which it is difficult for us to enter. It is not incumbent on the historical investigation of mythology to ascertain the foundations on which it rests. This must be left to the highest of all historical sciences — one whose internal relations are scarcely yet dreamt of — the history of the human mind." On which one at once answers, first, that mythology, as distinguished from mere mythography, must be of itself a part of the history of the human mind, if it is anything, and that it must in some sort settle its bases as it goes along; and, secondly, that Müller himself, in the next breath, goes on to specify such a foundation when he speaks of a" certain necessity of intuition " as underlying the formation of myths. But indeed he is thus reasoning on psychological grounds all through his treatise; and we are entitled to say that the deliverance above cited is in plain contradiction of his practice, as well as of his later and really sound decision, given in comment on Creuzer, that " mythology is still an historical science like every other. For can we call a mere compilation of facts history? and must we not, in every field of the science of history, ascend on the ladder of facts to a knowledge of internal being and life?"

That is the most serious contradiction in the book; and we can but say on the other hand that the reasoner enables us to correct him when he errs. His frequent protests (echoed by Grote) against the attribution of " allegory " to myths in general, do but point to the confessed imperfection of the "history of the human mind" — a consideration which should have made him more circumspect verbally. We are left asking, What is allegory? and while we can all agree that early Greeks certainly did not allegorize as did Spenser and Bunyan, and that the Prometheus story in its complete form is clearly late, we are none the less forced to surmise that something of the nature of allegory may enter even into early myths — that at times even the myth-making savage in a dim way necessarily distinguishes at the outset between his myth and his other credences, or at least is often in a manner allegorizing when he makes his story to explain the facts of nature. Where he differs from the scientific man (though not from the religious) is in his power of passing from the half-allegoric conception to the literalist. In any case, it is not historically or psychologically true that, as Müller puts it, " my thus and allegory are ideas lying [necessarily] far apart"; and we may, I think, be sure that some of the writers he antagonized were using the word " allegory "in a sense of which the practical fitness is tacitly admitted by his repeated use of the phrase " strictly allegorical." All the while he admitted, as does Grote after him, that an allegorical explanation frequently holds good of parts even of early myths; which is really a surrender of the essentials in the dispute.

As against these minor confusions, however, we must place to the credit of Ottfried Müller a general lucidity and a catholicity of method that make him still a valuable instructor. While he avoided the extravagances of the symbolists, he sensibly recognized and explained many symbols; and while he objected to allegoric systems he gave the sound advice: "Let us therefore, without rejecting anything of that kind, merely hold back, and wait for the development of individual cases." Without laying down the anthropological method, he prepares us for it, especially by his keen attention to the geography of Greek myth; and while disclaiming all-round interpretation he helps us to many solutions. The most helpful of his many luminous thoughts is perhaps his formulation of the principle, implicitly to be gathered from Creuzer, that in many cases " the whole my thus sprang from the worship, and not the worship from the my thus " — a principle accepted from him by Grote and by a number of later students, including Professor Robertson Smith and Dr. J. G. Frazer, and likely in the future to yield results of the first importance when applied to living as it has been to dead problems. But thereby hangs, as we shall see, a tale to the effect that the course of true mythology does not run smooth. The application of the science to living problems is the weakest point in its present development. Thus far, then, we may round our summary of progress: —

13. Karl Ottfried Müller and Emeric-David, proceeding on earlier studies and laying down general principles for myth interpretation (the former looking narrowly to documentary evidences and the latter putting stress on general symbolic values), alike failed on the one hand to explain the barbarous and primeval element in mythology, and on the other hand to connect mythology with the surviving religions. Each, however, gave sound general guidance, and Müller in particular established some rules of great importance.

§ 3. The Relation to Christianity.

So close on the publication of Ottfried Müller's Prolegomena as not to be fundamentally affected by it, came Strauss's epoch-marking Leben Jesu (1835), after Dupuis the first systematic application of mythological science to the Christian system. For several generations the mythical principle had been partially applied by German scholars to matters of current belief: the stimulus of the English deistical school having borne fruit more continuously among them than elsewhere. Deistical in spirit the movement remained; but it had all the easier a course; and the line of thought entered on by the school of Eichhorn, following on Heyne and Reimarus, was not even blocked, as was the case in England and France, by the reaction against the French Revolution. The Old Testament narratives, of course, were first dealt with; but so fast did criticism go that as early as 1802 there was published by G. L. Bauer a treatise on the Hebrew Mythology of the Old and New Testaments. The latter work is noteworthy as already laying down the principle that it is of the highest importance to compare the myths of different races, thereby to learn how parallels may stand not for identity of matter, but for similarity of experience and way of thought among men of a given culture-stage. It also affirms in so many words that "the savage animizes all things (denkt sich alles belebt), for only what lives can act, and thus he personifies all." But in his interpretations Bauer still follows the early rationalist method of reducing mythic episodes to exaggerations or misconceptions of actual events; and he makes little advance on Semler, who had connected the Samson myth with that of Hercules as early as 1773. Much if not most of the German " rationalism " of the latter part of the eighteenth and the early part of the nineteenth century is thus vitiated by the fixed determination to reduce mythic narratives to misinterpretations of real events. In Paulus the method approaches burlesque. Hence a discredit of the school and even of the name.

A generation later, whereas Keightley in producing the first edition of his Mythology of Ancient Greece and Italy (1831) could say that "in selecting mythology" he "took possession of a field which [in England] lay totally unoccupied," the Germans had a whole library of treatises compared with which even his much improved second edition was but a respectable and prejudiced manual. So far had free scholarship travelled at a time when the teachers of the insular and stipendiary Church of England were declaring that " infidelity" was no longer associated with scholarly names. While English theology and philosophy, under ecclesiastical auspices, were at an absolute standstill, German thought was applying rational tests, strenuously if imperfectly, to nearly every department of traditional knowledge. The progress, of course, was halting and uncertain at best. Strauss has shown how vacillating and inconsistent were most of the innovators in their advance; how they were always trying to limit their concession, attempting first to explain miracles as natural events, then admitting myth to a certain extent, seeking for each myth a historical basis, striving to limit the field of myth to early times, trying later to draw a line between the Old Testament and the New, and next to admit myth as regards only the infancy of Jesus — always compromising in the interests of faith, or of simple peace and quietness. Yet so early as 1799 an anonymous writer on " Revelation and Mythology " had substantially set forth Strauss's own thesis, that "the whole life of Jesus, all that he should and would do, had an ideal existence in the Jewish mind long prior to his birth"; and between this and the more limited treatment of details by intermediate writers the world was partly prepared for Strauss's own massive critical machine.

And yet, though the formidable character and effect of that is the theme of an abundant literature, it was not a decisive force, even for theoretical purposes. On the side of mythological science it was defective in that it overlooked many of the Pagan myth-elements in the Christian cult, above all those bound up with the very central doctrine of theanthropic sacrifice and eucharist; and this by reason of a too exclusive attention to Judaic sources. It dealt with the salient item of the Virgin-birth in the light of general mythology; but it ignored the connecting clue of the numerous ancient ritual cults of a Divine Child. It showed the incredibility and the irreconcilable confusions of the resurrection story; but it did not bring forward the mythic parallels. As regards the process of mythic accretion, it did not properly apply the decisive documentary test that lay to hand in the Pauline epistles. At many points Strauss is Evemeristic even in condemning Evemerism, as when he decides the historic reality of John the Baptist to be certain, and the story of the Sermon on the Mount to be in the main genuine, though manipulated by Matthew in one way and by Luke in another. Dealing with the obviously mythical story of the betrayal by Judas, he never realizes the central preposterousness of the narrative, and treats it as history. On the side of philosophy, again, he strikes a scientific reader dumb by his naive assurance that his long investigation of the life of Christ need have no effect on Christian doctrine. " The inner kernel of the Christian faith," he writes in his preface, " the author knows to be entirely independent of his critical researches. Christ's supernatural birth, his miracles, his resurrection and ascension, remain eternal truths, however far their reality as historical facts may be put in doubt. Only the certainty of this can give calmness and weight to our criticism and distinguish it from the naturalistic criticism of previous centuries, which aimed at upsetting the religious truth along with the historical fact, and so necessarily came to conduct itself frivolously. The dogmatic import (Gehalt) of the Life of Jesus will be shown by a dissertation at the end of the work to be uninjured." There are different conceptions of what constitutes frivolity; and it would have been pleasant to have Voltaire's estimate of the seriousness of a scholar and theologian who produced an enormously laborious treatise of fifteen hundred pages to disprove every supernatural occurrence connected with the life of Jesus, and at the beginning and end assured everybody that it all made no difference to religion, and that those must be frivolous who thought otherwise. Only in Hegelian Germany could such supernatural flimsiness of theory have been conceived as solid philosophy; and even in Germany, in the generation of Hegel, there was a good deal of serious if not frivolous comment on Strauss's final Kantian advice to the clergy. This was, to keep on telling the mythical stories to the people with due attention to the spiritual application, thereby furthering the " endless " progress towards the dissolution of the forms in the consciousness of the community — and this in a work in the vernacular. Mr. Arnold gravely if not bitterly complained that Colenso ought to have written in Latin, though Colenso's avowed purpose was to put an end to deception. He might a good deal more relevantly have given the advice to Strauss, whose work he not very ingenuously exalted in comparison.

It was not unnatural that such a teaching should leave the practice of Christendom very much where it found it. If the " rational " critic felt as Strauss did after fifteen hundred pages of destructive argument, there was small call for the priest to alter his course. And what has happened in regard to the mythology of both the Judaic and the Christian systems is roughly this, that after the mythical character of the quasi-supernatural narratives had been broadly demonstrated, specialist criticism, instead of carrying out the demonstration and following it up to its conclusions in all directions, has fallen back on the textual analysis of the documents, leaving the question of truth and reason as much as possible in the background. Later work on Hebrew mythology there has been, but not, as before, on the part of professed theologians; and even that, as we shall see, is to a considerable extent unconvincing, thus failing to counteract the arrest of the study. On the professional Biblicists it seems to have had no practical effect, their lore being at least kept free of any specific acknowledgment. One surmises that this process of restriction turns upon one of selection in the personalities of the men concerned. It would seem impossible that after Strauss and Baur and Renan and Colenso the stronger and more original minds could deliberately take up theology as of old; and as a matter of fact no minds of similar energy have appeared in the Churches since that generation completed their work. For Baur we have Harnack; for Bishop Colenso Bishop Barry; the Bishop Creightons meddling with none of these things. The powerful minds of the new generation do not take up orthodox theology at all; the business is for them too factitious, too unreal, too essentially frivolous. So we get a generation of specialists devoutly bent on settling whether a given passage be by P or P2 , by the Yahwist or the Elohist, the Deuteronomist or the Redactor, the Jerusalem Davidian, or the other, or the Saulist or the Samuel-Saulist — an interesting field of inquiry, very well worth clearing up, but forming a singular basis on which to re-establish the practice of taking that mosaic of forgery and legend as the supreme guide to human conduct. Of course this is the only species of rational criticism that can be pursued in theological chairs even in Germany; so that even if a professor recognizes the need for a moral and intellectual criticism of the Judaic literature, he must be fain to confine himself to documentary analysis and platitudes. But the dyer's hand seems to be subdued to what it works in. Even in our own day, men engaged in the analysis tell us that the scribes and interpolators dealt with really had supernatural qualifications after all. It thus appears that when the higher criticism has done its work, the higher common-sense will have to take up the dropped clues of mythology and conduct us to a scientific sociologico-historical view of religious development. The textual analysis is a great gain; but to end with textual analysis is to leave much of the human significance of the phenomena unnoticed.