all of us, to have a conception of any thing is
tantamount to believing that it exists, or has existed: belief is no
separate act of mind, but is itself included in the perception or the
thought; it is experience and reflection which have to ingraft their
_disbelief_, and teach us that every thing we _think_ is not equally
_true_. An ignorant people are all children, and with them there is but
one rule of faith: the more vivid the impression, the stronger the
belief,--the more marvellous the story, the less possibility of doubting
it. And consider this--that we, owing to our scientific habits of
thought, and the long record of the by-gone world which lies open to us,
entertain it as a general law, that the past has, in certain essentials,
resembled the present; but our unlettered people, looking out into the
blank foretime, would have no such law to regulate or restrain their
belief. On the contrary, their impression would naturally be, that the
past was, essentially different from the present, or why was it _past_?
Why all this change and transiency, if the same things were to be
repeated? All people that have had no records have filled up the void
with beings and events as unlike as possible to those they were familiar
with. They had a prevailing impression that that blank space was the
region of the wonderful; and the day-dreamer, the imaginative man, who
was, naturally enough, proclaimed to be inspired, since none could tell
how his knowledge came, was generally at hand to fill up the blank space
with appropriate picture.

An age of awakening criticism begins to find the legend doubtful--cannot
entirely believe, cannot entirely dismiss the old familiar
story,--begins to interpret it as allegory, or to separate the probable
incidents from the improbable, receiving the first, rejecting the
second. A new rule of faith has been introduced; not what is most
captivating and strange, but what best harmonises with the common
occurrences of life, is to be the most readily believed. The exuberant
legend is therefore pruned down and mutilated, or it is represented as
the fantastic shadow of some quite natural circumstance,--strange shadow
for such substance!--and in this state it is admitted to a certain
credence. But who sees not that this is no separation of history from
fable, but merely a reduction of the fable into something we can
pronounce to be probable? But the probability of this residue is no
sufficient ground for o