such myths as those of Prometheus and Epimetheus,
the fore-thinker and the after-thinker; the historical in the deluge of
Deucalion, the sieges of Thebes and of Troy. A harmony with human nature
is established through the birth and marriage of the gods, and likewise
by their sufferings, passions, and labours. The supernatural is
gratified by Centaurs, Gorgons, Harpies, and Cyclops.

It would be in vain to attempt the reduction of such a patchwork system
to any single principle, astronomical or moral, as some have tried to
do--a system originating from no single point as to country or to time.
The gradual growth of many ages, its diversities are due to many local
circumstances. Like the romances of a later period, it will not bear an
application of the ordinary rules of life. It recommended itself to a
people who found pleasure in accepting without any question statements
no matter how marvellous, impostures no matter how preposterous. Gods,
heroes, monsters, and men might figure together without any outrage to
probability when there was no astronomy, no geography, no rule of
evidence, no standard of belief. But the downfall of such a system was
inevitable as soon as men began to deal with facts; as soon as history
commenced to record, and philosophy to discuss. Yet not without
reluctance was the faith of so many centuries given up. The extinction
of a religion is not the abrupt movement of a day, it is a secular
process of many well-marked stages--the rise of doubt among the candid;
the disapprobation of the conservative; the defence of ideas fast
becoming obsolete by the well-meaning, who hope that allegory and new
interpretations may give renewed probability to what is almost
incredible. But dissent ends in denial at last.

[Sidenote: Primitive astronomy and geography.]

[Sidenote: The under world and its spectres.]

Before we enter upon the history of that intellectual movement which
thus occasioned the ruin of the ancient system, we must bring to
ourselves the ideas of the Greek of the eighth century before Christ,
who thought that the blue sky is the floor of heaven, the habitation of
the Olympian gods; that the earth, man's proper abode, is flat and
circularly extended like a plate beneath the starry canopy. On its rim
is the circumfluous ocean, the source of the rivers, which all flow to
the Mediterranean, appropriately in after ages so called, since it is in
the midst, in the centre of the expanse of the land