sacrifice,[1] or of a spiritual communion in prayer as existing from the first between man and God. All these doctrines may be legitimate deductions; but if to us the record itself gives only mysterious glimpses of a future fuller revelation, if to us these inferences from its contents are the result of careful comparison with the later books of tlie Old Testament, if even to us their harmony with the belief of prophets and righteous men of later ages seems clear only because we have been taught to regard it as clear, then what evidence have we that in the time of which the third chapter of Genesis speaks to us, our first parents had a full, or indeed any, apprehension of what even to us apart from later associations would be faint and shadowy ? For if on the revelation made to them the vast mass of Greek mythology grew up as a corrupt incrustation, they must have received these truths not in their germ but in full dogmatic statement. It is difficult to understand how such a statement would have been to them anything more than a dead unmeaning formula, waiting to be quickened into life by the breath of a later revelation or by the evidence of later facts.
Course of revelation in the Old Testament.If, again, there is any one lesson which may be drawn before others from the character of the Old Testament records, it is that ideas, dim and feeble at first, acquire gradually strength and consistency, that the clearness of revelation is increased as the stream widens, and that all positive belief is the result of years and generations of discipline. But in some mysterious way, while the course of the Jewish people was from the lesser to the greater, they in whose hands the Homeric theology was moulded started with a fulness of doctrinal knowledge which was not attained by the former until a long series of centuries had passed away.
Necessity of accounting for the character of Greek mythology.There is an instinctive reluctance to accept any theory which heightens human depravity and corruption, unless there are weighty reasons for doing so.[2] And, unquestionably, on the hypothesis which has just been examined, the mythology of the Greeks exhibits an instance of wilful and profane perversion, to which it would not be easy to find a parallel. But the character of that mythology still remains when we have rejected this supposition. We have still before us the chronicles or legends of gods who not merely eat and drink and sleep, but display the working of the vilest of human passions. Some process, therefore, either conscious or unconscious,