no longer a drawn one
so far as the intellect is concerned. It is merely a question of how
long it will take before the victory will be recognized and proclaimed
by all educated people.

As the evolutionary point of view forced its way into recognition,
scholars became aware of the real nature of myth and legend; they
realized that beliefs of this sort are products of a creative
group-consciousness saturated with a view of the world which we have
slowly outgrown; they sensed the mental complexity of the past and
became suspicious of the naive assumption that religions were formed in
a generation by the sheer authority of a single man or of a small group
of men. The first clear statement of this changed point of view was
the work of David Friedrich Strauss in his famous _Life of Jesus_.
Strauss developed the idea that much of religious literature consists
of myths and dogmas, not created out of whole cloth by would-be
deceivers, but woven by the stimulated fancy of groups working in the
atmosphere of traditions and attitudes which the most intense research,
alone, can make living {65} to the scholar. There can be little doubt
that this standpoint is essentially correct. Before it could be
applied satisfactorily, however, painstaking investigation of the
literature and recorded customs of the people of the Mediterranean
basin had to be carried through. Only by now has this task been so far
achieved that the main features of the
Graeco-Syrian-Palestinian-Egyptian world are open to a sympathetic
inspection. No one who has not done some work in this field at first
or second hand can realize the difficulties which confronted
investigators. Fragments found here and there in the writings of the
Church Fathers, the teachings of the Jews of Alexandria, the
apocalyptic literature discovered in remote places, inscriptions
unearthed here and there, all were carefully studied and compared and
forced to yield their quota of information.

It is a psychological principle which must always be reckoned with that
the less an untrained individual knows about the past, the more certain
of the correctness of his assumed knowledge he is prone to be. For
example, the American who has read one or more of the over-simplified
text-books dealing with the history of his country, which are used in
the schools, has a clear-cut picture of the various events, knows
exactly how they occurred and who was in the right. The university
teacher,