nce in that
they provide a theme for humour and profanity and rough handling, which
is thus expended, not on the sacred realities themselves, but on their
shadows and images. Among certain savages God's personal name is too
holy to be breathed but in mysteries; yet His mythological substitute is
represented to be as grotesque, freakish, and immoral as the Zeus of the
populace. We can hardly enter into such a frame of mind, though possibly
the irreverences and buffooneries of some of the miracle-plays of the
middle ages are similarly to be explained as the rebound from the strain
incident to a continual sense of the nearness of the supernatural; and
perhaps the _Messer Domeniddio_ of the Florentines stood rather for a
mental effigy that might be played with, than for the reasoned
conception of the dread Deity. If we possessed a minutely elaborated
history of the Good Shepherd and His adventures, or of the Prodigal's
father, or of the Good Samaritan, interspersed with all manner of
ludicrous and profane incidents, and losing sight of the original
purport of the figure, we should have something like a mythology. Were
it not stereotyped as part of an inspired record, the mere romancing
tendency of the imagination would easily have added continually to the
original parable, wholly forgetful of its spiritual significance.

It is part of the very economy of the Incarnation to meet this weakness,
to provide for this want of the human mind; to satisfy the imagination
as well as the intelligence. Here Divine truth has received a Divine
embodiment, has been set forth in the language of deeds, in a real and
not in a fictitious history. Sacrifice and sacrament, and every kind of
natural religious symbolism, has been appropriated and consecrated to
the service of truth and to the fullest utterance of God that such weak
accents will stretch to. Here the channel of communication between
Heaven and earth is not of man's creation but of God's; or at least is
of God's composition. This is the great difference between the ethnic
religions and a religion that professes to be revealed--that is, spoken
by God and put into language by Him. The latter is, so to say, cased in
an incorruptible body, its very expression being chosen and sealed for
ever with Divine approval, and rescued from the fluent and unstable
condition of religions whose clothes are the works of men's hands. Here
it is that Catholic Christianity stands out as altogether cathol