tural
being or beings, concerned with the fortunes of mankind, and once active
in the making of the earth and its inhabitants. There is the hypothesis
of an original divine tradition, darkened by the smoke of foolish mortal
fancies. There is the hypothesis of an innate and intuitive sensus
numinis. There is the opinion that the notion of Deity was introduced
to man by the very nature of his knowledge and perceptions, which compel
him in all things to recognise a finite and an infinite. There is the
hypothesis that gods were originally ghosts, the magnified shapes of
ancestral spectres. There is the doctrine that man, seeking in his early
speculations for the causes of things, and conscious of his own powers
as an active cause, projected his own shadow on the mists of the
unknown, and peopled the void with figures of magnified non-natural men,
his own parents and protectors, and the makers of many of the things in
the world.

"Since the actual truth cannot be determined by observation and
experiment, the question as to the first germs of the divine conception
must here be left unanswered. But it is possible to disengage and
examine apart the two chief elements in the earliest as in the latest
ideas of Godhead. Among the lowest and most backward, as among the most
advanced races, there coexist the MYTHICAL and the RELIGIOUS elements
in belief. The rational factor (or what approves itself to us as the
rational factor) is visible in religion; the irrational is prominent
in myth. The Australian, the Bushman, the Solomon Islander, in hours
of danger and necessity 'yearns after the gods,' and has present in his
heart the idea of a father and friend. This is the religious element.
The same man, when he comes to indulge his fancy for fiction, will
degrade this spiritual friend and father to the level of the beasts,
and will make him the hero of comic or repulsive adventures. This is the
mythical or irrational element. Religion, in its moral aspect, always
traces back to the belief in a power that is benign and works for
righteousness. Myth, even in Homer or the Rig-Veda, perpetually falls
back on the old stock of absurd and immoral divine adventures.(1)

(1) M. Knappert here, in a note to the Dutch translation, denies the
lowest mythical element to the Hebrews, as their documents have reached
us.

"It would be rash, in the present state of knowledge, to pronounce that
the germ of the serious Homeric sense of the justice a