hether designedly or undesignedly, consciously or
unconsciously, makes no difference), is one of the principal
difficulties. If it had been objected to Pere Hardouin, that Virgil's
"Aeneid" could nor have been composed by one of the monks of the
Middle Ages. I suppose that it would have been no relief from the
difficulties of his hypothesis to say that it was a gradual,
unconsciously formed deposit of the monkish mind! But besides all
this, I said, the theory was loaded with other absurdities specially
its own: for we must then believe all the indications of historic
plausibility to which I had adverted in speaking of the previous theory
to be the work of accident; a supposition, if possible, still more
inconceivable than that some superhuman genius for fiction had been
employed on their elaboration. Things moulder into rubbish, but they
do not moulder into fabrics. And then (I continued) the greatest
difficulty, as before, reappears, how came these queer legends,
the product whether of design or accident, to be believed? Jews and
Gentiles were and must have been thoroughly opposed to them.

To this he replied, "I suppose the belief, as you also do, anterior
to the books, which express that belief, but did not cause it. I
suppose the Christian system already existing as a floating vapor
and merely condensed into the written form. It was a gradual
formation, like the Greek and Indian mythologies." I thought on this
for some time, and then said something like this:--

Worse and worse: for I fear that the age of Augustus was no age in
which the world was likely to frame a mythology at all:--if it had
been such an age, the problem does not allow sufficient time for it;--if
there had been sufficient time, it would not have been such a mythology;
--and if there had been any formed, it would not have been rapidly
embraced, any more than other mythologies, by men of different races,
but would have been confined to that which gave it birth.

As to the first point, you ask me to believe that something like the
mythology of the Hindoos or Egyptians could spring up and diffuse
itself in such an age of civilization and philosophy, books and
history; whereas all experience shows us that only a time of
barbarism, before authentic history has commenced, is proper to
the birth of such monstrosities; that this congelation of tradition
and legend takes place only during the long frosts and the deep night
of ages, and is impossible in t