forest and cultivate the land. The beasts did not approve of this, and at night they replaced the trees and shrubs that had been removed. Hunahpu and Xbalanque next night secreted themselves behind the felled timber, and awaited the coming on of the beasts. First came the lion and tiger; they leaped over the trees. Then came the stag and rabbit; the demi-gods caught them by their tails, and the animals fled, leaving their caudal appendages behind them, and to this day these creatures are destitute of tails. Next to be caught was the rat, whom the brothers Hunahpu and Xbalanque put in their handkerchief; they held him over a fire and singed his tail, and squeezed him so tight that his eyes nearly started out of his head, and thus ever after the rat's tail is hairless, and its eyes protrude.1

Mythology is the systematization of myths. All myths are not religious myths, but no religion which has any hold on the affections and imaginations of men can be without a mythology. The reduction of the floating beliefs and traditions to a system was the work of a later age, and then they were grouped into theogonies, cosmogonies, and eschatologies; that is, those relating to the gods, those relating to the origin of the world, and those relating to the fate of man and of the world. The change in the character of the gods from natural objects to physical forces, and then to moral governors, has been spoken of. During this progress, a number of myths which had been attached to divinities fell away and suffered brotomorphosis; that is, they were attributed to human historical personages. For many of the old stories told of the gods related how they had died, and when the incompatibility of mortality with divinity was perceived, the stories were associated with heroes, and thus formed an heroic cycle of mythology which has stamped it

1 Brasseur de Bourbourg: Popol Vuh, p. 125; Paris, 1861.

self on the great epic poems of the world. The mighty deeds of the gods were now those of great warriors or benefactors of the race, but their divine origin was recognized by making them the offspring of deities. Among the Greeks, Helena, Achilles, Perseus, Danae, Bellerophon, Herakles, etc.; among the Germans, Sigfried, Gunther, Hagen, Wieland, Kriemhild, and others; among the Celts, Arthur, Uther, Pendragon, Merlin; the Indian heroes of the "Mahâbhârata," the Persian heroes of the "Shahnameh," the Scandinavian heroes of the "Edda," the Finnish Wainamoinen, Ilmarinen, Lemikainen of the "Kalewala; "the Esthonian sons of Kalew of the "Kalewipoeg;" the Hunahpu and Xbalanque of the Quiche "Popol Vuh," etc., are all ancients gods who have become heroes when the popular opinion forbade the gods to be mortal.

Euhemerus wrote a history of the gods, in which he pretended to prove, by the help of forged inscriptions, that they had been on earth and had been mortals whom men had deified. In like manner, Snorro Sturlason set Odin down in his history as the first king of the Norsemen; and Saxo Grammaticus has introduced the whole theogony of Scandinavian mythology into his pedigree of the Danish kings. The account of Ragnarok, the Twilight of the gods, passed from sacred eschatology into the domain of chivalrous romance; and in the verses of the Trouvères the defeat of Roncevaux recalls most of the features of the final crash of the universe described by the Scandinavian Vala.

CHAPTER IX.

IDOLATRY.

Idolatry, the worship of a person or object.-Forms assumed by idolatry: 1. Fetishism.-The philosophy of Fetishism.-Obligations owed by humanity to Fetishism.-Defect in Fetishism; 2. Symbolism.--All expressions of ideas are symbolic.--Symbolic writing.-Symbolic gesture.-Symbolic language.-Obligations due to symbolism.-Defect in symbolism; 3. Ideolatry.-Anthropomorphism.

DOLATRY is the adoration (λarpɛía) of a presentation

IDOL

(eidwλov), that presentation being either sensible or ideal. The formation of eldwλa is a law of our nature. Every term we employ is taken from material images, and every notion we form is moulded on sensible perceptions. If an idea be divested of every concretion, it ceases to be conceivable. Thought and language are alike finite, and it is impossible to build up ideas, except with materials already collected by our senses; and these the imagination breaks up, arranges, and pieces together anew. In the wildest play of fancy, every ingredient has at former times been taken up, either through the perception or through internal presentation, and the formation of the image is the-perhaps incongruous-fusion of material turned out of the storehouse of memory. We can imagine Pegasus, not because we have seen such a creature, but we have seen horses and also birds' wings, and these we combine ideally.

Abstract ideas are merely idols less wooden than concrete ideas. The very terms made use of to denote those ideas farthest removed from sensible associations were once as picturesque and material as those expressive of concre

tions, but cultivated thought makes allowance for these deficiencies, strips them of their picturesqueness, and sublimates their materialism.

"Our mind," says Boyle, "makes us think and speak after the manner of true and positive beings of such things as are chimerical, and some of them negations and privations themselves, as death, ignorance, blindness, and the like."

When we say, "Virtue is its own reward," the whole phrase is intensely anthropomorphic; we give virtue personality, a power of action, and a sense of gratification.

The more abstract or general a term is, the less precise is the image mentally accompanying it. In the series, Animal, Man, Frenchman, Parisian, the idea becomes gradually more clear as the range is narrowed.

When the mind conceives an idea of God, that idea is an image more or less distinct proportionately to the personality with which the idea is invested. The idea of an impersonal God is inconceivable. One idea may be less personal than another idea, but that is all. The savage forms a grosser notion of the Deity than the European peasant, and the notion of the peasant is grosser than that of the philosopher. The difference is one of degree.

The Articles of the English Church forbid us to hold that God has parts and passions like ourselves; but if He is to be worshipped, every prayer must be a departure from this injunction. The Christian missionary differs from the heathen in this particular: his God is a mental image, and that of the heathen is a material image.

The Jew was strictly forbidden to make any graven representation of Jehovah; but in the Hebrew Scriptures He was anthropomorphized through the exigencies of thought and language. The Anglican Article which declares that God has neither parts nor passions, adds that He has wisdom

and goodness. Man is not a body only, he has mind and dispositions as well; and the attribution to the Deity of wisdom and goodness is every whit as much anthropomorphosis as the attribution of limbs and passions.

Prayer supposes two factors, man and God: man the subject, God the object. Now the object must be either sensibly or ideally presented, or prayer becomes impossible. If sensibly objected, man worships a fetish, or an artistic image; if ideally objected, he forms in his brain at the moment of prayer a transitory image, which if cut in wood or stone. would be permanent. But, inasmuch as only physical existence can be represented artistically, image-worship may become prejudicial to man's religious progress, by restraining him from spiritual idolatry.

The object may be also verbally expressed, and the formation of a sacred name is a process analogous to the formation of a sacred image. Thus onomatolatry is the equivalent of idolatry.

I am conscious of an idea of God. I desire to objectivate it. I do so in one of two ways, which is determined by the mode of writing with which I am familiar. At the present time in Europe the system is phonetic; of old it was pictographic. I write GOD, and in so doing my mind undergoes the following processes: I give to the idea a sound conventionally assumed to express that idea. I then resolve that sound into its phonetic ingredients; to each vocal sound a character has been conventionally assigned. These signs I arrange in a conventional order from left to right, and thus the thought finds expression. The primitive mode of writing -that out of which, by a series of modifications, the characters traced by my pen have been elaborated—was pictorial, and the process simple. A desire was felt by man to fix his evanescent thoughts, and transmit them to others. For this purpose he employed figures of men, animals, and vari