through
a glass darkly."

(1) See Civilisation: its Cause and Cure, ch. i.

I think it is impossible not to see--however much in our pride of
Civilization (!) we like to jeer at the pettinesses of tribal
life--that these elder people perceived as a matter of fact and direct
consciousness the redeeming presence (within each unit-member of the
group) of the larger life to which he belonged. This larger life was a
reality--"a Presence to be felt and known"; and whether he called it by
the name of a Totem-animal, or by the name of a Nature-divinity, or
by the name of some gracious human-limbed God--some Hercules, Mithra,
Attis, Orpheus, or what-not--or even by the great name of Humanity
itself, it was still in any case the Saviour, the living incarnate Being
by the realization of whose presence the little mortal could be lifted
out of exile and error and death and suffering into splendor and life
eternal.

It is impossible, I think, not to see that the myriad worship of
"Saviours" all over the world, from China to Peru, can only be
ascribed to the natural working of some such law of human and tribal
psychology--from earliest times and in all races the same--springing up
quite spontaneously and independently, and (so far) unaffected by the
mere contagion of local tradition. To suppose that the Devil, long
before the advent of Christianity, put the idea into the heads of all
these earlier folk, is really to pay TOO great a compliment both to the
power and the ingenuity of his Satanic Majesty--though the ingenuity
with which the early Church DID itself suppress all information about
these pre-Christian Saviours almost rivals that which it credited to
Satan! And on the other hand to suppose this marvellous and universal
consent of belief to have sprung by mere contagion from one accidental
source would seem equally far-fetched and unlikely.

But almost more remarkable than the world-encircling belief in
human-divine Saviours is the equally widespread legend of their birth
from Virgin-mothers. There is hardly a god--as we have already had
occasion to see--whose worship as a benefactor of mankind attained
popularity in any of the four continents, Europe, Asia, Africa and
America--who was not reported to have been born from a Virgin, or at
least from a mother who owed the Child not to any earthly father, but to
an impregnation from Heaven. And this seems at first sight all the more
astonishing because the belief in the pos