f transformed into loathsome beasts, should be engulfed in a fiery
furnace. The two cities, always opposite in essence, should thus be
finally divided in existence, each bearing its natural fruits and
manifesting its true nature.

Let the reader fill out this outline for himself with its thousand
details; let him remember the endless mysteries, arguments, martyrdoms,
consecrations that carried out the sense and made vital the beauty of
the whole. Let him pause before the phenomenon; he can ill afford, if he
wishes to understand history or the human mind, to let the apparition
float by unchallenged without delivering up its secret. What shall we
say of this Christian dream?

[Sidenote: Mythology is a language and must be understood to convey
something by symbols.]

Those who are still troubled by the fact that this dream is by many
taken for a reality, and who are consequently obliged to defend
themselves against it, as against some dangerous error in science or in
philosophy, may be allowed to marshal arguments in its disproof. Such,
however, is not my intention. Do we marshal arguments against the
miraculous birth of Buddha, or the story of Cronos devouring his
children? We seek rather to honour the piety and to understand the
poetry embodied in those fables. If it be said that those fables are
believed by no one, I reply that those fables are or have been believed
just as unhesitatingly as the Christian theology, and by men no less
reasonable or learned than the unhappy apologists of our own ancestral
creeds. Matters of religion should never be matters of controversy. We
neither argue with a lover about his taste, nor condemn him, if we are
just, for knowing so human a passion. That he harbours it is no
indication of a want of sanity on his part in other matters. But while
we acquiesce in his experience, and are glad he has it, we need no
arguments to dissuade us from sharing it. Each man may have his own
loves, but the object in each case is different. And so it is, or should
be, in religion. Before the rise of those strange and fraudulent Hebraic
pretensions there was no question among men about the national,
personal, and poetic character of religious allegiance. It could never
have been a duty to adopt a religion not one's own any more than a
language, a coinage, or a costume not current in one's own country. The
idea that religion contains a literal, not a symbolic, representation of
truth and life is simply a