literopinari, erant tantum in manibus
clericorum, priora per saecula." (Quoted in Taylor's Diegesis, p. 48.)

[463:3] Mosheim: vol. i. pt. 2, ch. ii.

[463:4] General Survey of the Canon, p. 459.

[464:1] Credibility of the Gospels.

[464:2] Marsh's Michaelis, vol. ii. p. 160. The Sinaitic MS. is believed
by Tischendorf to belong to the fourth century.

[464:3] Ibid. p. 368.

[464:4] Eusebius: Ecclesiastical Hist. lib. 3, ch. xxii.

[465:1] The Science of Religion, pp. 30, 31.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

EXPLANATION.

After what we have seen concerning the numerous virgin-born, crucified
and resurrected Saviours, believed on in the Pagan world for so many
centuries before the time assigned for the birth of the Christian
Saviour, the questions naturally arise: were they real personages? did
they ever exist in the flesh? whence came these stories concerning them?
have they a foundation in truth, or are they simply creations of the
imagination?

The _historical_ theory--according to which _all_ the persons mentioned
in mythology were once real human beings, and the legends and fabulous
traditions relating to them were merely the additions and embellishments
of later times--which was so popular with scholars of the last century,
has been altogether abandoned.

Under the historical point of view the gods are mere deified mortals,
either heroes who have been deified after their death, or
Pontiff-chieftains who have passed themselves off for gods, and who, it
is gratuitously supposed, found people stupid enough to believe in their
pretended divinity. This was the manner in which, formerly, writers
explained the mythology of nations of antiquity; but a method that
pre-supposed an historical Crishna, an historical Osiris, an historical
Mithra, an historical Hercules, an historical Apollo, or an historical
Thor, was found untenable, and therefore, does not, at the present day,
stand in need of a refutation. As a writer of the early part of the
present century said:

"We shall never have an ancient history worthy of the perusal
of men of common sense, till we cease treating poems as
history, and send back such personages as Hercules, Theseus,
Bacchus, etc., to the heavens, whence their history is taken,
and whence they never descended to the earth."

The historical theory was succeeded by the _allegorical_ theory, which
supposes that all the myths of the ancients were _allegorical_ and
_sym