t.

(1) The hypothesis that the conception was borrowed from European
creeds will be discussed later. See, too, "Are Savage Gods borrowed from
Missionaries?" Nineteenth Century, January, 1899.

It will later be shown that even some of the most backward savages make
a perhaps half-conscious distinction between their mythology and their
religion. As to the former, they are communicative; as to the latter,
they jealously guard their secret in sacred mysteries. It is improbable
that reflective "black fellows" have been morally shocked by the
flagrant contradictions between their religious conceptions and their
mythical stories of the divine beings. But human thought could not come
into explicit clearness of consciousness without producing the sense of
shock and surprise at these contradictions between the Religion and the
Myth of the same god. Of this we proceed to give examples.

In Greece, as early as the sixth century B. C., we are all familiar with
Xenophanes' poem(1) complaining that the gods were credited with the
worst crimes of mortals--in fact, with abominations only known in the
orgies of Nero and Elagabalus. We hear Pindar refusing to repeat the
tale which told him the blessed were cannibals.(2) In India we read the
pious Brahmanic attempts to expound decently the myths which made Indra
the slayer of a Brahman; the sinner, that is, of the unpardonable sin.
In Egypt, too, we study the priestly or philosophic systems by which the
clergy strove to strip the burden of absurdity and sacrilege from their
own deities. From all these efforts of civilised and pious believers to
explain away the stories about their own gods we may infer one fact--the
most important to the student of mythology--the fact that myths were not
evolved in times of clear civilised thought. It is when Greece is just
beginning to free her thought from the bondage of too concrete language,
when she is striving to coin abstract terms, that her philosophers and
poets first find the myths of Greece a stumbling-block.

(1) Ritter and Preller, Hist. Philos., Gothae, 1869, p. 82.

(2) Olympic Odes, i., Myers's translation: "To me it is impossible to
call one of the blessed gods a cannibal.... Meet it is for a man that
concerning the gods he speak honourably, for the reproach is less. Of
thee, son of Tantalus, I will speak contrariwise to them who have gone
before me." In avoiding the story of the cannibal god, however, Pindar
tells a tale even m