realize
these facts, the richer becomes that great body of literature brought
together within the covers of the Bible. What matters it that those who
incorporated the Creation lore of Babylonia and other Oriental
nations into the sacred books of the Hebrews, mixed it with their own
conceptions and deductions? What matters it that Darwin changed the
whole aspect of our Creation myths; that Lyell and his compeers placed
the Hebrew story of Creation and of the Deluge of Noah among legends;
that Copernicus put an end to the standing still of the sun for Joshua;
that Halley, in promulgating his law of comets, put an end to the
doctrine of "signs and wonders"; that Pinel, in showing that all
insanity is physical disease, relegated to the realm of mythology the
witch of Endor and all stories of demoniacal possession; that the Rev.
Dr. Schaff, and a multitude of recent Christian travellers in Palestine,
have put into the realm of legend the story of Lot's wife transformed
into a pillar of salt; that the anthropologists, by showing how man
has risen everywhere from low and brutal beginnings, have destroyed the
whole theological theory of "the fall of man"? Our great body of sacred
literature is thereby only made more and more valuable to us: more and
more we see how long and patiently the forces in the universe which make
for righteousness have been acting in and upon mankind through the only
agencies fitted for such work in the earliest ages of the world--through
myth, legend, parable, and poem.

CHAPTER XVIII. FROM THE DEAD SEA LEGENDS TO COMPARATIVE MYTHOLOGY,

I. THE GROWTH OF EXPLANATORY TRANSFORMATION MYTHS.

A few years since, Maxime Du Camp, an eminent member of the French
Academy, travelling from the Red Sea to the Nile through the Desert
of Kosseir, came to a barren slope covered with boulders, rounded and
glossy.

His Mohammedan camel-driver accounted for them on this wise:

"Many years ago Hadji Abdul-Aziz, a sheik of the dervishes, was
travelling on foot through this desert: it was summer: the sun was hot
and the dust stifling; thirst parched his lips, fatigue weighed down his
back, sweat dropped from his forehead, when looking up he saw--on this
very spot--a garden beautifully green, full of fruit, and, in the midst
of it, the gardener.

"'O fellow-man,' cried Hadji Abdul-Aziz, 'in the name of Allah, clement
and merciful, give me a melon and I will give you my prayers.'"

The gardener answere