tion. At bottom some
belief in a kind of Pope! At bottom still better, belief that there is
a _Greatest_ Man; that _he_ is discoverable; that, once discovered, we
ought to treat him with an obedience which knows no bounds! This is the
truth of Grand Lamaism; the "discoverability" is the only error here.
The Thibet priests have methods of their own of discovering what Man is
Greatest, fit to be supreme over them. Bad methods: but are they so
much worse than our methods,--of understanding him to be always the
eldest-born of a certain genealogy? Alas, it is a difficult thing to
find good methods for!--We shall begin to have a chance of understanding
Paganism, when we first admit that to its followers it was, at one time,
earnestly true. Let us consider it very certain that men did believe
in Paganism; men with open eyes, sound senses, men made altogether like
ourselves; that we, had we been there, should have believed in it. Ask
now, What Paganism could have been?

Another theory, somewhat more respectable, attributes such things
to Allegory. It was a play of poetic minds, say these theorists; a
shadowing forth, in allegorical fable, in personification and visual
form, of what such poetic minds had known and felt of this Universe.
Which agrees, add they, with a primary law of human nature, still
everywhere observably at work, though in less important things, That
what a man feels intensely, he struggles to speak out of him, to see
represented before him in visual shape, and as if with a kind of life
and historical reality in it. Now doubtless there is such a law, and it
is one of the deepest in human nature; neither need we doubt that it did
operate fundamentally in this business. The hypothesis which ascribes
Paganism wholly or mostly to this agency, I call a little more
respectable; but I cannot yet call it the true hypothesis. Think, would
_we_ believe, and take with us as our life-guidance, an allegory, a
poetic sport? Not sport but earnest is what we should require. It is a
most earnest thing to be alive in this world; to die is not sport for
a man. Man's life never was a sport to him; it was a stern reality,
altogether a serious matter to be alive!

I find, therefore, that though these Allegory theorists are on the way
towards truth in this matter, they have not reached it either. Pagan
Religion is indeed an Allegory, a Symbol of what men felt and knew about
the Universe; and all Religions are symbols of that, alter