Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/326

294 the familiar sound. And throughout, the persistent suggestion of an Unknown God who is dimly made known to men by a series of prophets who come and go with the ages; or perhaps rather, by a Spirit (which is divine but not God) successively animating and inspiring one teacher after another, being identical in all: it is undying and unresting, the wandering Jew of the spiritual world. But behind this is working the perpetual attraction of a suffering and dying deity, one who cannot be the supreme God on whom the universe depends because of these vicissitudes, but who is therefore closer and dearer, and more helpful to mankind. Whether this deity be, as in earlier naturism, merely, a symbol of the vegetation which dies down to revive again, or, in times of more self-conscious humanism, an unselfish martyr for a cause, such a figure alone can bring comfort to man's soul and give a reason and motive to his struggling life.