the unclean birds; we must gather them and bury them, and sum up their labours, and inscribe the record of their actions on their tombs as an honourable epitaph.  If Christianity really is passing away, if it has done its work, and if what is left of it is now holding us back from better things, it is not for our bitterness but for our affectionate acknowledgment, not for our heaping contempt on what it is, but for our reverent and patient examination of what it has been, that it will be content to bid us farewell, and give us God speed on our further journey.

In the Natural History of Religions certain broad phenomena perpetually repeat themselves; they rise in the highest thought extant at the time of their origin; the conclusions of philosophy settle into a creed; art ornaments it, devotion consecrates it, time elaborates it.  It grows through a long series of generations into the heart and habits of the people; and so long as no disturbing cause interferes, or so long as the idea at the centre of it survives; a healthy, vigorous, natural life shoots beautifully up out of it.  But at last the idea becomes obsolete; the numbing influence of habit petrifies the spirit in the outside ceremonial, while quite new questions rise among the thinkers, and ideas enter into new and unexplained relations.  The old formula will not serve; but new formulae are tardy in appearing; and habit and superstition cling to the past, and policy vindicates it, and statecraft upholds it forcibly as serviceable to order, till, from the combined action of folly, and worldliness, and ignorance, the once beautiful symbolism becomes at last no better than “a whited sepulchre full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.”  So it is now.  So it was in the era of the Caesars, out of which Christianity arose; and Christianity, in the form which it assumed at the close of the Arian controversy, was the deliberate solution which the most powerful intellects of that day could offer of the questions which had grown out with the growth of mankind, and on which Paganism had suffered shipwreck.

Paganism, as a creed, was entirely physical.  When Paganism rose men had not begun to reflect upon themselves, or the infirmities of their own nature.  The bad man was a bad man—­the coward a coward—­the liar a liar—­individually hateful and despicable.  But in hating and despising such unfortunates, the old Greeks were satisfied to have felt all that was necessary about them; and how such a phenomenon as a bad man came to exist in this world, they scarcely cared to inquire.  There is no evil spirit in the mythology as an antagonist of the gods.  There is the Erinnys as the avenger of monstrous villanies; a Tartarus where the darkest criminals suffer eternal tortures.  But Tantalus and Ixion are suffering for enormous crimes, to which the small wickedness of common men offers no analogy.  Moreover, these and other such stories are but curiously ornamented myths, representing physical phenomena.