Could all this have been invented?  This people could not themselves have explained the meaning of their myth, and yet it dove-tails into every fact revealed by our latest science as to the Drift Age.

[1.  Bancroft’s “Native Races,” vol. iii, p. 46.]

{p. 246}

And then, the “Popul Vuh” tells us, the sun petrified their gods:  in other words, the worship of lions, tigers, and snakes, represented by stone idols, gave way before the worship of the great luminary whose steadily increasing beams were filling the world with joy and light.

And then the people sang a hymn, “the song called ‘Kamucu,’” one of the oldest of human compositions, in memory of the millions who had perished in the mighty cataclysm: 

“We see;” they sang, “alas, we ruined ourselves in Tulan; there lost we many of our kith and kin; they still remain there! left behind!  We, indeed, have seen the sun, but they—­now that his golden light begins to appear, where are they?”

That is to say, we rejoice, but the mighty dead will never rejoice more.

And shortly after Balam-Quitzé, Balam-Agab, Mahucutah, and Iqui-Balam, the hero-leaders of the race, died and were buried.

This battle between the sun and the comet graduated, as I have shown, into a contest between light and darkness; and, by a natural transition, this became in time the unending struggle between the forces of good and the powers of evil—­between God and Satan; and the imagery associated with it has,—­strange to say,—­continued down into our own literature.

That great scholar and mighty poet, John Milton, had the legends of the Greeks and Romans and the unwritten traditions of all peoples in his mind, when he described, in the sixth book of “Paradise Lost,” the tremendous conflict between the angels of God and the followers of the Fallen One, the Apostate, the great serpent, the dragon, Lucifer, the bright-shining, the star of the morning, coming, like the comet, from the north.

{p. 247}

Milton did not intend such a comparison; but he could not tell the story without his over-full mind recurring to the imagery of the past.  Hence we read the following description of the comet; of that—­

“Thunder-cloud of nations,
Wrecking earth and darkening heaven.”

Milton tells us that when God’s troops went forth to the battle—­

        “At last,

Far in the horizon, to the north, appeared
From skirt to skirt, a fiery region stretched,
In battailous aspect, and nearer view
Bristled with upright beams innumerable
Of rigid spears, and helmets thronged and shields
Various, with boastful arguments portrayed,
The banded powers of Satan, hasting on
With furious expedition. . . . 
High in the midst, exalted as a god,
The apostate, in his sun-bright chariot, sat,
Idol of majesty divine, inclosed
With flaming cherubim and golden shields.”