false prophecies,--so
long did the tradition linger. In the Spanish peninsula, indeed, the
superstition has been by no means confined to Christians. The Moors who
were left in the mountains of Valentia looked for the return of their
hero Alfatimi upon a green horse, from his place of concealment in the
Sierra de Aguar, to defend them and to put their Catholic tyrants to the
sword.[154]

Oppression nourishes beliefs of this kind. It was under the Roman
dominion that the Jewish expectation of a Messiah grew to its utmost
strength; and the manifestation of the Messiah was to be preceded by the
reappearance of Elijah, a prophet who was not dead but translated to
heaven. And strange sometimes are the gods from whom salvation is to
come. Only a few years ago, if we may trust Bishop Melchisedech of
Roumania, there was a Slavonic sect, the object of whose worship was
Napoleon the First. He, said his worshippers, had not really died; he
was only at Irkousk, in Siberia, where, at the head of a powerful, an
invincible, army, he was ready once more to overrun the world.[155]

But, however the belief in a deity, or hero, who is to return some day,
may be strengthened by political causes, it is not dependent upon them.
Many races having traditions of a Culture God--that is, of a superior
being who has taught them agriculture and the arts of life, and led them
to victory over their enemies--add that he has gone away from them for
awhile, and that he will some day come back again. Quetzalcoatl and
Viracocha, the culture gods of Mexico and Peru, are familiar instances
of this. In the later Brahminism of India, Vishnu, having already
accomplished nine avatars, or incarnations, for special emergencies in
the past, was yet to have one more avatar for the final destruction of
the wicked and the restoration of goodness at the end of the present
age; he would then be revealed in the sky seated on a white horse and
wielding a blazing sword. I need not specify others: it will be manifest
that the traditions of modern Europe we have been considering contain
the same thought. Nor is it unlikely that they have been influenced by
the Christian doctrine of the Second Advent. Many of them have received
the polish of literature. The stories of Olger and Arthur, for example,
have descended to us as romances written by cultivated men. Don
Sebastian was the plaything of a political party, if not the symbol of
religious heresy, for nearly two centuries.