and we have seen that out of a study
of these identities in beliefs, symbolisms, rites, ceremonies,
histories, and commemorative festivals, has arisen a modern school which
relates the whole of these to a common source in human ignorance, and in
a primitive explanation of natural phenomena. From these identities have
been drawn weapons for the stabbing of each religion in turn, and the
most effective attacks on Christianity and on the historical existence
of its Founder have been armed from this source. On entering now on the
study of the life of the Christ, of the rites of Christianity, its
sacraments, its doctrines, it would be fatal to ignore the facts
marshalled by Comparative Mythologists. Rightly understood, they may be
made serviceable instead of mischievous. We have seen that the Apostles
and their successors dealt very freely with the Old Testament as having
an allegorical and mystic sense far more important than the historical,
though by no means negating it, and that they did not scruple to teach
the instructed believer that some of the stories that were apparently
historical were really purely allegorical. Nowhere, perhaps, is it more
necessary to understand this than when we are studying the story of
Jesus, surnamed the Christ, for when we do not disentangle the
intertwisted threads, and see where symbols have been taken as events,
allegories as histories, we lose most of the instructiveness of the
narrative and much of its rarest beauty. We cannot too much insist on
the fact that Christianity gains, it does not lose, when knowledge is
added to faith and virtue, according to the apostolic injunction.[158]
Men fear that Christianity will be weakened when reason studies it, and
that it is "dangerous" to admit that events thought to be historical
have the deeper significance of the mythical or mystical meaning. It is,
on the contrary, strengthened, and the student finds, with joy, that the
pearl of great price shines with a purer, clearer lustre when the
coating of ignorance is removed and its many colours are seen.

There are two schools of thought at the present time, bitterly opposed
to each other, who dispute over the story of the great Hebrew Teacher.
According to one school there is nothing at all in the accounts of His
life save myths and legends--myths and legends that were given as
explanations of certain natural phenomena, survivals of a pictorial way
of teaching certain facts of nature, of impressing