and scarcely any tincture of astronomy or geography-but which, on the other hand, was full of religious faith, distinguished for quick and susceptible imagination, seeing personal agents where we only look for objects and laws;-an age, moreover, eager for new narrative, accepting with the unconscious impressibility of children, (the question of truth or falsehood being never formally raised), all which ran in harmony with its preëxisting feelings, and penetrable by inspired poets and prophets in the same proportion that it was indifferent to positive evidence."* It is true that the operation of the mythopoeic faculty is not absolutely extinct in a more cultured time; yet its peculiar province is the childhood of a people. As Grote elsewhere says, "to understand properly the Grecian myths, we must try to identify ourselves with the state of mind of the original mythopoeic age; a process not very easy, since it requires us to adopt a string of poetical fancies not simply as realities, but as the governing realities of the mental system; yet a process which would only reproduce something analogous to our own childhood." Of the point of view from which the myths were looked upon by the Greek, he adds: "Nor need we wonder that the same plausibility which captivated his imagination and his feelings was sufficient to engender spontaneous belief; or rather that no question as to the truth or falsehood of the narrative suggested itself to his mind. His faith is ready, literal, and uninquiring, apart from all thought of discriminating fact from fiction." If we turn to the age of Augustus, we find a condition of society at a world-wide remove from this primitive era of sentiment and fancy. Some are deceived by the supposed analogy of the middle ages, which, however, were wholly different, and more resembled the ancient nations in their period of immaturity. The Greek and Roman literature and science had passed away. Christianity, with its doctrines and miracles, had been received by the fresh, uncivilized peoples of Europe, and these, full of the new sentiments and beliefs which were awakened by Christianity, dwelling, so to speak, in an atmosphere of the super

* Grote, Vol. I., p. 451.

natural, created the mass of mythical stories which fill up the voluminous lives of the saints. It was the work of unlettered, imaginative, uninquiring peoples, on the basis and under the stimulus of the miraculous history of the Gospels. "Such legends," says Mr. Grote, "were the natural growth of a religious faith, earnest, unexamining, and interwoven with the feelings at a time when the reason does not need to be cheated. The lives of the saints bring us even back to the simple and ever-operative theology of the Homeric age."* Totally dif ferent was the state of things among the old nations at the advent of Christianity. We must not forget that, so far as intellectual development is concerned, along with the downfall of ancient civilization, the tides of history rolled back. New nations came upon the stage and a period of childhood ensued. Dr. Arnold, writing to Bunsen, points out the anachronism involved in Strauss's theory. "The idea," exclaims Arnold, "of men writing mythic histories between the time of Livy and Tacitus, and of St. Paul mistaking such for realities! "+

"

* Grote, Vol. I., p. 471. Renan compares the Gospels to the Lives of St. Francis. The disciples of St. Francis were full of the spirit of their master; and what was that spirit? Enthusiasm, that falls below absolute madness, can rise no higher than in the example of St. Francis. His asceticism stopped short of no austerities which the body could endure. His inward life, like his outward career, was a continual romance. His mystic fervor betrayed itself in his ordinary speech-in his apostrophes to birds and beasts, and even to inanimate things. "His life," says Milman, "might seem a religious trance." 'Incessantly active as was his life, it was a kind of paroxysmal activity, constantly collapsing into what might seem a kind of suspended animation of the corporeal functions." As to the witnesses to the "wounds" of Christ on his person, one of them testifies to seeing the soul of St. Francis, after his death, on its flight through the air to heaven! In this atmosphere of fancy and credulous (though sincere) devotion, he and they lived. As to the loose habit of observation and great inaccuracy of medieval writers in describing ordinary objects, which justly excite incredulity in regard to their stories of miracles, see Dr. Arnold's Lectures on History, p. 128. He gives an instance of this carelessness from Bede, who was reputed the most learned man of his age. "I cannot think," says Arnold, "that the unbelieving spirit of the Roman world was equally favorable to the origination and admission of stories of miracles with the credulous tendencies of the middle ages." (p. 129.) No doubt bodily austerities, vigils, fastings, and the like, together with the spirit of unbounded credulity, might produce extraordinary phenomena which could easily be mistaken for miracles.

Life and Correspondence of Arnold, p. 293, N.

Strauss labors hard to create a different impression in respect to the character of the age of the apostles. He appeals to the occasional mention of prodigies by Tacitus and Josephus-as the supernatural sights and sounds attending the capture of Jerusalem. But if current reports of this sort of preternatural manifestation convict an age of an unhistorical spirit, there is no state of society that would not be liable to this charge. Even skeptics, like Hobbes, have not escaped the infection of superstitious fear. These passages in Josephus and Tacitus are chiefly remarkable as being exceptions to the ordinary style of their narratives. Strauss endeavors to make much of the two alleged miracles of Vespasian, at Alexandria, which are noticed by Tacitus and also by Suetonius. But whatever may have been the fact at the bottom, the circumstances in the narrative of Tacitus afford a striking exemplification of the historical spirit of the times, and, thus, of the falsehood of Strauss's general position. When the application was made to Vespasian by the individuals on whom the cures are said to have been wrought, he laughed at their request and “treated it with contempt."* The applicants being importunate in their request, and pretending to make it by the direction of the god Serapis, Vespasian had a talk with the physicians, who stated the nature of the diseases, and were quite non-committal on the question whether the Emperor could effect a cure in the manner desired. The entire passage in Tacitus shows at least a full consciousness that the event is wholly anomalous and not to be accepted without satisfactory proof. The truth is that the creative period in the ancient nations when the mythological religions sprung up, had long ago passed by. Even the belief in them was fast crumbling away, and yielding to skepticism. This engendered, to be sure, a superstition to fill up the void occasioned by the destruction of the old belief.

* Vespasian behaved like William of Orange, who sneered at the old practice of touching for the king's evil. This behavior of William gave great scandal to not a few. (Macaulay's Hist. of England, Vol. III., p. 432, seq.) Many invalids resorted to the king to be touched. Yet who will infer that the age of William was not an "historical" age, or suppose that a mythology could have arisen in England in the seventeenth century and established itself in the popular faith?

The professors of the

Hence magic and sorcery were rife. black art, to use a more modern phrase, drove a lucrative business, and found credulous followers, as the apostles discovered in their missionary journeys. But this despairing superstition was a phenomenon lying at the opposite pole from that action of the mythopoeic tendency which belongs, as we have explained, to the freshness of youth. Pilate spoke out the feelings of the cultivated Roman in the skeptical question, What is truth? Nor is Strauss more successful in the attempt to find among the Jews, in particular, a condition of society suitable for the origination of myths. Prophecy had long since died. out. A stiff legalism, with its "traditions of the elders," had chilled the free movement of religious life. Nor is it true that among the Jews, in the time of Christ, a miracle had only to be stated to be believed. Miracles (unless exorcism be reckoned one) were not supposed to occur. They were considered to belong to an era of their history, long past. A miracle was an astounding fact. "Since the world began," it was said, (John ix. 32), "was it not heard that any man opened the eyes of one that was born blind." The Gospels are full of parables, allegories, showing a state of mind, in teacher and hearer, inconsistent with the production of myths. In the parable, the idea is held in an abstract form, and a fiction is contrived to represent it. Ottfried Müller, in answer to the question, how long the myth-building spirit continues, explains that the fusion or confounding of idea and fact, which constitutes the myth, could take place only so long as the habit did not exist of presenting the one apart from the other-either idea apart from narrative, or narrative apart from the mythopoeic idea. But when ideas are apprehended as such, in an abstract form, or veracious history is written, the mythical era is gone. So far from there being a reign of credulity, there existed, in the Sadducees, an outspoken skeptical party who regarded with coldness and suspicion the supernatural elements in their own religion. How could myths arise among those who listened to debates like that which Matthew records between

*Prolegomena, S. 170.

Christ and the Sadducees, "who say that there is no resurrection ? "* So far from there being among the Jews in the time of Christ an irresistible tendency to glorify the object of reve rence by attributing to him miraculous works, it is a fact, of which the advocates of the mythical theory can give no plausible explanation, that no miracles are ascribed to John the Baptist, though he was considered in the early church to be inferior to no prophet who had preceded him. If there was this unreflecting and credulous habit which is imputed to the Jewish Christians, why is no instance of miraculous healing interwoven in the description which the Gospels give us of the career of the forerunner of Jesus? He was supernaturally enabled to designate the Messiah, but he himself, though he is characterized in terms of exalted praise, is not represented as endowed with supernatural power. It is, also, significant that the life of Jesus up to the time of his entrance upon his public ministry, is left an almost unbroken blank. Had the disciples given the reins to their imagination, as the theory of Strauss supposes, they would almost infallibly have filled up the childhood of Christ with myths, after the manner of the spurious gospels of a later date. But Mark and John pass over in silence the whole of the preparatory period of thirty years. Matthew passes immediately from his birth and infancy to his public ministry, while Luke interposes but a single anecdote of his childhood. Why this remarkable reticence, unless the reason be that the apostles chose to dwell upon that of which they had a direct, personal knowledge?

It may be objected to the foregoing remarks that the original authors of the mythical narratives are supposed to be persons aloof from the great world and beyond the influence of its culture-Galileans of humble rank. The existence of a class of disciples, cut off from the guidance of the apostles, has before been disproved. But apart from this, the supposed

* Matt. xxii. 23, seq. Julius Müller refers to this passage in his cogent review of Strauss, in the Studien u. Kritiken, 1836. III.

The Apocryphal gospels were generally the offspring of pious fraud. They were composed, for the most part, to further the cause of some heretical doctrine or party.