Again the priest and the doctor stole a furtive glance across the young minister’s head.  It was Father Forbes who replied.

“I fear that you are taking our friend Abraham too literally, Mr. Ware,” he said, in that gentle semblance of paternal tones which seemed to go so well with his gown.  “Modern research, you know, quite wipes him out of existence as an individual.  The word ‘Abram’ is merely an eponym—­it means ‘exalted father.’  Practically all the names in the Genesis chronologies are what we call eponymous.  Abram is not a person at all:  he is a tribe, a sept, a clan.  In the same way, Shem is not intended for a man; it is the name of a great division of the human race.  Heber is simply the throwing back into allegorical substance, so to speak, of the Hebrews; Heth of the Hittites; Asshur of Assyria.”

“But this is something very new, this theory, isn’t it?” queried Theron.

The priest smiled and shook his head.  “Bless you, no!  My dear sir, there is nothing new.  Epicurus and Lucretius outlined the whole Darwinian theory more than two thousand years ago.  As for this eponym thing, why Saint Augustine called attention to it fifteen hundred years ago.  In his ‘De Civitate Dei,’ he expressly says of these genealogical names, ‘Gentes non HOMINES;’ that is, ‘peoples, not persons.’  It was as obvious to him—­as much a commonplace of knowledge—­as it was to Ezekiel eight hundred years before him.”

“It seems passing strange that we should not know it now, then,” commented Theron; “I mean, that everybody shouldn’t know it.”

Father Forbes gave a little purring chuckle.  “Ah, there we get upon contentious ground,” he remarked.  “Why should ‘everybody’ be supposed to know anything at all?  What business is it of ‘everybody’s’ to know things?  The earth was just as round in the days when people supposed it to be flat, as it is now.  So the truth remains always the truth, even though you give a charter to ten hundred thousand separate numskulls to examine it by the light of their private judgment, and report that it is as many different varieties of something else.  But of course that whole question of private judgment versus authority is No-Man’s-Land for us.  We were speaking of eponyms.”

“Yes,” said Theron; “it is very interesting.”

“There is a curious phase of the subject which hasn’t been worked out much,” continued the priest.  “Probably the Germans will get at that too, sometime.  They are doing the best Irish work in other fields, as it is.  I spoke of Heber and Heth, in Genesis, as meaning the Hebrews and the Hittites.  Now my own people, the Irish, have far more ancient legends and traditions than any other nation west of Athens; and you find in their myth of the Milesian invasion and conquest two principal leaders called Heber and Ith, or Heth.  That is supposed to be comparatively modern—­about the time of Solomon’s Temple.  But these independent Irish myths go back to the fall of the