at all on this side was
consciously considered as fanciful play or emblem, all on that
side as earnest fact. Each particular in each case must be
examined by itself and be decided on its own merits by the light
and weight of the moral probabilities. For example, if there was
any historic basis for the myth of Herakles dragging Cerberus out
of Hades, it was that this hero forcibly entered the Mysteries and
dragged out to light the enactor of the part of the three headed
dog. The aged North man, committing martial suicide rather than
die in his peaceful bed, undoubtedly accepted the ensanguined
picture of Valhalla as a truth. Virgil, dismissing Aneas from the
Tartarean realm through "the ivory gate by which false dreams and
fictitious visions are wont to issue," plainly wrought as a poet
on imaginative materials.

It should be recollected that most of the early peoples had no
rigid formularies of faith like the Christian creeds. The writings
preserved to us are often rather fragments of individual
speculations and hopes than rehearsals of public dogmas. Plato is
far from revealing the contemporaneous belief of Greece in the
sense in which Thomas Aquinas reveals the contemporaneous belief
of Christendom. In Egypt, Persia, Rome, among every cultured
people, there were different classes of minds, the philosophers,
the priests, the poets, the warriors, the common multitude, whose
modes of thinking were in contrast, whose methods of interpreting
their ancestral traditions and the phenomena of human destiny were
widely apart, whose respective beliefs had far different
boundaries. The openly skeptical Euripides and Lucian are to be
borne in mind as well as the apparently credulous Hesiod and
Homer. Of course the Fables of Asop were not literally credited.
Neither, as a general thing, were the Metamorphoses of Ovid. With
the ancients, while there was a general national cast of faith,
there were likewise varieties of individual and sectarian belief
and unbelief, skepticism and credulity, solemn reason and
recreative fancy.

The people of Lystra, as we read in the Acts of the Apostles,
actually thought Barnabas and Paul were Zeus and Hermes, and
brought oxen and garlands to offer them the sacrifices appropriate
to those deities. Peisistratus obtained rule over Athens by
dressing a stately woman, by the name of Phye, as Athene, and
passing off her commands as those of the tutelary goddess.
Herodotus ridicules the people for uns