Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/887

Rh a great mass of evidence, which, as far as I have seen, there has been no serious endeavor, if indeed any endeavor, to repel. Dr. Réville observes that my views have been subjected to "very profound criticism" by Sir G. Cox in his learned work on Aryan mythology (p. 41). That is indeed a very able criticism; but it is addressed entirely to the statements of my earliest Homeric work. Now, apart from the question whether those statements have been rightly understood (which I can not admit), that which he attacks is beyond and outside of the proposition which I have given above. Sir G. Cox has not attempted to decide the question whether there was a primitive revelation, or whether it may be traced in Homer. And I may say that I am myself so little satisfied with the precise form in which my general conclusions were originally clothed that I have not reprinted and shall not reprint the work, which has become very rare, only appearing now and then in some catalogue, and at a high price. When there are representatives living and awake, why disturb the ashes of the dead? In later works, reaching from 1865 to 1875, I have confessed to the modification of my results, and have stated the case in terms which appear to me, using the common phrase, to be those yielded by the legitimate study of comparative religion. But why should those, who think it a sound method of comparative religion to match together the Vedas, the Norse legends, and the Egyptian remains, think it to be no process of comparative religion to bring together, not vaguely and loosely, but in searching detail, certain traditions of the Book of Genesis and those recorded in the Homeric poems, and to argue that their resemblances may afford proof of a common origin, without any anticipatory assumption as to what that origin may be?

It will hardly excite surprise, after what has now been written, when I say I am unable to accept as mine any one of the propositions which Dr. Réville (pp. 41, 42) affiliates to me. (1) I do not hold that there was a "systematic" or willful corruption of a primitive religion. (2) I do not hold that all the mythologies arc due to any such corruption systematic or otherwise. (3) I do not hold that no part of them sprang out of the deification of natural facts. (4) I do not hold that the ideas conveyed in the Book of Genesis, or in any Hebrew tradition, were developed in the form of dogma, as is said by Sir G. Cox, or in "six great doctrines" as is conceived by Dr. Réville; and (5) I am so far from ever having held that there was a "primitive orthodoxy" revealed to the first men (p. 43) that I have carefully from the first referred not to developed doctrine, but to rudimentary indications of what are now developed and established truths. So that, although Dr. Réville asks me for proof, I decline to supply proofs of what I disbelieve. What I have supplied proofs of is the appearance in the Poems of a number of traits, incongruous in various degrees with their immediate environment, but having such marked and characteristic resemblances to the Hebrew tradition as to require of us, in the character of rational inquirers, the admission of a common origin, just as the markings, which we sometimes notice upon the coats of horses and donkeys, are held to require the admission of their relationship to the zebra.

It thus appears that Dr. Réville has discharged his pistol in the air, for my Homeric propositions involve no assumption as to a revelation contained in the Book of Genesis, while he has not ex professo contested my statements of an historical relationship between some traditions of that book and those of the Homeric poems. But I will now briefly examine (1) the manner in which Dr. Réville handles the Book of Genesis, and (2) the manner in which he undertakes, by way of specimen, to construe the mythology of Homer, and enlist it, by comparison, in the support of his system of interpretation. And first with the first-named of these two subjects.

Entering a protest against assigning to the Book "a dictatorial authority," that is, I presume, against its containing a Divine