n, and that their fancy played so much
round the mysteries of plant growth that they made them their
holiest arcana. Hence it appears that the savages were far more
modest and refined than our civilised contemporaries, for almost
all our works of imagination, both in literature and art, make
human love their theme in all its aspects, whether healthy or
pathological; whereas the savage, it seems, thought only of his
crops. Nothing can be more astonishing than this discovery,
if it be true, but there are many facts which might lead us to
believe that the romance of love inspired early art and religion
as well as modern thought.

And again:

Religion is a gorgeous efflorescence of human love. The tender
passion has left its footsteps on the sands of time in magnificent
monuments and libraries of theology.

This may seem startling to many orthodox readers, but it is no new
theory, and is doubtless quite true, for all gods have been made by
man, and all theologies have been evolved by man, and the odour and the
colour of his human passions cling to them always, even after they are
discarded. Under all man's dreams of eternal gods and eternal heavens
lies man's passion for the eternal feminine. But on these subjects
"Moses" spoke in parables, and I shall not speak at all.

Mr. Robertson, in _Christianity and Mythology_, says of the Bible:

It is a medley of early metaphysics and early fable--early,
that is, relatively to known Hebrew history. It ties together
two creation stories and two flood stories; it duplicates
several sets of mythic personages--as Cain and Abel, Tubal-Cain
and Jabal; it grafts the curse of Cham on the curse of Cain,
making that finally the curse of Canaan; it tells the same
offensive story twice of one patriarch and again of another;
it gives an early "metaphysical" theory of the origin of death,
life, and evil; it adapts the Egyptian story of the "Two Brothers,"
or the myth of Adonis, as the history of Joseph; it makes use
of various God-names, pretending that they always stood for
the same deity; it repeats traditions concerning mythic
founders of races--if all this be not "a medley of early fable,"
what is it?

I quote next from _The Bible and the Child_, in which Dean Farrar says:

Some of the books of Scripture are separated from others by the