only a loose and savage fashion of wandering
life, while, as beasts irrational, they cared for no more than to fill
their bellies, being in a manner without God in the world." Growing
a little more civilised, men, according to Eusebius, sought after
something divine, which they found in the heavenly bodies. Later,
they fell to worshipping living persons, especially "medicine men" and
conjurors, and continued to worship them even after their decease,
so that Greek temples are really tombs of the dead.(1) Finally, the
civilised ancients, with a conservative reluctance to abandon their
old myths (Greek text omitted), invented for them moral or physical
explanations, like those of Plutarch and others, earlier and later.(2)

(1) Praep. E., ii. 5.

(2) Ibid., 6,19.

As Eusebius, like Clemens of Alexandria, Arnobius, and the other early
Christian disputants, had no prejudice in favour of Hellenic mythology,
and no sentimental reason for wishing to suppose that the origin of
its impurities was pure, he found his way almost to the theory of the
irrational element in mythology which we propose to offer.

Even to sketch the history of mythological hypothesis in modern times
would require a book to itself. It must suffice here to indicate the
various lines which speculation as to mythology has pursued.

All interpretations of myth have been formed in accordance with the
ideas prevalent in the time of the interpreters. The early Greek
physicists thought that mythopoeic men had been physicists. Aristotle
hints that they were (like himself) political philosophers.(1)
Neo-platonists sought in the myths for Neo-platonism; most Christians
(unlike Eusebius) either sided with Euhemerus, or found in myth the
inventions of devils, or a tarnished and distorted memory of the
Biblical revelation.

(1) Met., xi. 8,19.

This was the theory, for example, of good old Jacob Bryant, who saw
everywhere memories of the Noachian deluge and proofs of the correctness
of Old Testament ethnology.(1)

(1) Bryant, A New System, wherein an Attempt is made to Divest Tradition
of Fable, 1774.

Much the same attempt to find the Biblical truth at the bottom of savage
and ancient fable has been recently made by the late M. Lenormant, a
Catholic scholar.(1)

(1) Les Origines de l'Histoire d'apres le Bible, 1880-1884.

In the beginning of the present century Germany turned her attention to
mythology. As usual, men's ideas were biassed by