es from the dawn's couch. In all this we see
clearly a scarcely figurative description of the material sun and its
motions. A quasi-scientific fancy spins these fables almost inevitably
to fill the vacuum not yet occupied by astronomy. Such myths are indeed
compacted out of wonders, not indeed to add wonder to them (for the
original and greatest marvel persists always in the sky), but to
entertain us with pleasant consideration of them and with their
assimilation to our own fine feats. This assimilation is unavoidable in
a poet ignorant of physics, whom human life must supply with all his
vocabulary and similes. Fortunately in this need of introducing romance
into phenomena lies the leaven that is to leaven the lump, the subtle
influence that is to moralise religion. For presently Apollo becomes a
slayer of monsters (a function no god can perform until he has ceased to
be a monster himself), he becomes the lovely and valorous champion of
humanity, the giver of prophecy, of music, of lyric song, even the
patron of medicine and gymnastics.

[Sidenote: The leaven of religion is moral idealism.]

What a humane and rational transformation! The spirit of Socrates was
older than the man and had long been at work in the Greeks. Interest
had been transferred from nature to art, from the sources to the fruits
of life. We in these days are accustomed as a matter of course to
associate religion with ideal interests. Our piety, unlike our barbarous
pantheistic theology, has long lost sight of its rudimentary material
object, and habituated us to the worship of human sanctity and human
love. We have need all the more to remember how slowly and reluctantly
religion has suffered spiritualisation, how imperfectly as yet its
superstitious origin has been outgrown. We have need to retrace with the
greatest attention the steps by which a moral value has been insinuated
into what would otherwise be nothing but a medley of magic rites and
poetic physics. It is this submerged idealism which alone, in an age
that should have finally learned how to operate in nature and how to
conceive her processes, could still win for religion a philosopher's
attention or a legislator's mercy.

CHAPTER V

THE HEBRAIC TRADITION

[Sidenote: Phases of Hebraism.]

As the Vedas offer a glimpse into the antecedents of Greek mythology, so
Hebrew studies open up vistas into the antecedents of Christian dogma.
Christianity in its Patristic form was an a