narrative is to be deemed
fabulous when it proceeds from an age in which there were no written
records," such, for instance, as any account of the creation of the
first man--for no event could possibly happen unless there was a scribe
there to write it. Or, of the fall of man--we do not know that Adam was
able to write, and no man can tell truth unless he writes a history. "A
narrative is to be deemed fabulous when it presents, as historical,
accounts of events which were beyond the reach of experience, as events
connected with the spiritual world." Is it not self-evident that you and
I have had experience of everything in the whole universe, and whoever
tells us anything which we have never seen is a liar. "When a narrative
deals in the marvelous," such as Xenophon's Retreat of the Ten Thousand,
Herodotus' History, or Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
dealing as it does in such marvelous accounts as the death of half the
inhabitants of the empire in the reign of Galerius, or any other history
of wonderful occurrence--it is of course a myth. Does not every one know
that nothing marvelous ever happened, or, if it did, would any historian
trouble himself to record a prodigy? "Or, if it is couched in symbolical
language," as is every eloquent passage in Thucydides, Robertson,
Gibbon, or Guizot, the records of China, and of India, the
picture-writing of the Peruvians, and especially the Egyptian
hieroglyphics, which were fondly expected to do such good service
against the Bible--it must be at once rejected, without further
examination, as mythological and unworthy of any credit whatever. Thus
we are conclusively rid forever of the Bible, for sure enough it is
couched in symbolical language. Blessed deliverance to the world! But
then, alas! this great deliverance is accompanied with several little
inconveniences. All poetry, three-fourths of the world's history, and
the largest part of its philosophy, is couched in symbolical language,
and especially the whole of the science of metaphysics, from which
these very learned writers have deduced such edifying conclusions, is,
from the beginning to the end, nothing but a symbolical application of
the terms which describe material objects, to the phenomena of mind.
Alas! we must forever relinquish "the absolute," and "the infinite," and
"the conditioned," with all their "affinities and potencies," up to
"higher unity," and "the rhythm of universal existence," and all the