Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/247

 Rh obscuring one of the main points of origin, and one of the main sources of attraction and dissemination.

But, if we go to India or to Egypt, more so to the former, the Jātaka has retained fully the religious character. The legends of saints and the miracles of the Apostles in the Apocryphal Acts, the story of Psyche and the legend of Adonis-Tammuz, the parables of Barlaam stand in the service of religion, and are carried on the crest of the religious wave, which spreads and covers one continent after the other.

The abiding factor in human life has been, for centuries, religious teaching; and whatever appeared under that form, was doubly welcomed. The tales and legends are so many means to teach a moral lesson, to inculcate a peculiar dogma, or to bring home to the minds of the people some abstract ethical truth. The standard of these maxims and the trend of the religious teachings conveyed through the parable are in absolute harmony with the religious environment. A Buddhist tale may teach transmigration-of-the-soul; an Egyptian, metamorphosis, or change of man into animal. Another will describe that form of Hell which is recognised by the dogma of his Church. But all point to one source, the religious and didactical, as the originating factor in the first place, and in the second, as one of the causes of the transmission. In this transmission the first change that will set in will be to transform, and then to drop slowly that religious element. It gets out of harmony. It is no more understood. Popular fancy will not fasten on it; but will cling to the poetical excuse in the form of an entertaining tale. Local deities and current beliefs will take the place of the old deities of the original form, when and Vv'here there is such a local mythology to supplant it. But where the fairies and goblins have departed from the hearth of the farmer, and have deserted the crossings of the roads, the tale will lack the poetical machinery, and get impoverished and attenuated to the extreme. It has lost,