s not so bad as slander and backbiting. Human sacrifice
offered to the Lord of life and death at His own behest, is something
that did not seem wicked and inconceivable to Abraham. Head-hunting is
not a pretty game; nor is scalping and mutilation the most generous
treatment of a fallen foe; yet war has seen worse things done by those
who professed an ethical religion.

But, chief among the causes why savage religion has been so
misrepresented, is the almost universal co-existence of a popularized
form of religion addressed to the imagination, with that which speaks to
the understanding alone. As has already been said, man's imagination is
at war with his intelligence when supersensible realities, such as God
and the soul, are in question. Without figures we cannot think; yet the
timeless and spaceless world can ill be figured after the likeness of
things limited by time and space. This mental law is the secret of the
invariable association of mythology with religion. Setting aside the
problem as to how the truths of natural religion (_sc._ that there is a
God the rewarder of them that seek Him) are first brought home to man,
it is certain that if he does not receive them embedded in history or
parable, in spoken or enacted symbolism, he will soon fix and record
them in some such language for himself. Christ recognized the necessity
of speaking to the multitude in parables, not attempting to precise or
define the indefinable; but contenting Himself with: "The Kingdom of
Heaven is _like_," &c. "I am content," says Sir Thomas Browne, "to
understand a mystery without a rigid definition, in an easie and
Platonick description," and it is only through such easie and Platonick
descriptions that spiritual truth can slowly be filtered into the
popular mind. Still when we consider how prone all metaphors are to be
pressed inexactly, either too far, or else not far enough, how abundant
a source they are of misapprehension, owing to the curiosity that will
not be content to have the gold in the ore, but must needs vainly strive
to refine it out, we can well understand how mythology tends to corrupt
and debase religion if it be not continually watched and weeded; and
how, being, from the nature of the case, ever to the front, ever on
men's lips and mingling with their lives, it should seem to the outsider
to be not the imperfect garment of religion, but a substitute for it.
Yet in some sense these mythologies are a safeguard of revere