Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/40

14 this discussion, do I define a myth? Mr. Hartland asks, "What is the distinction between religious belief and myth? Where does the one begin and the other end?" (Folk-Lore, p. 296.) I may refer Mr. Hartland for an answer to what he might have consulted, namely, what I wrote twelve years ago in Myth, Ritual, and Religion; for here at least I have not altered my ideas since writing that book (vol. i., ch. xi.). But Mr. Hartland might think that I had changed my mind. "Since the actual truth cannot be determined by observation and experiment, the question as to the first germs of the divine conception must here be left unanswered. But it is possible to disengage and examine apart the two chief elements in the earliest as in the latest ideas of Godhead. Among the lowest and most backward, as amongst the most advanced races, there coexist the mythical and the religious elements in belief. The rational factor (or what approves itself to us as the rational factor) is visible in religion; the irrational is prominent in myth. The Australian, the Bushman, the Solomon Islander, in hours of danger and necessity 'yearns after the gods,' and has present in his heart the idea of a father and friend. This is the religious element. The same man, when he comes to indulge his fancy for fiction, will degrade this spiritual friend and father to the level of the beasts, and will make him the hero of comic or repulsive adventures. This is the mythical or irrational element. Religion in its moral aspect always traces back to the belief in a power that is benign and works for righteousness. Myth, even in Homer or the Rig-Veda, perpetually falls back on the old stock of absurd and immoral divine adventures."

This line is drawn repeatedly in Myth, Ritual, and Religion (1887). I admit that "the belief in a Creator, it may be argued, is itself—a myth." Now, without discussing that argument, I would be understood thus: The lowest savages, I think (contrary to a generally held opinion), have