FAITH IN THE EARLY MYTHES. 357 part of the superior minds (and more or less on the part of all) to a stricter and more elevated canon of credibility, in conse quence of familiarity with recorded history, and its essential tests, affirmative as well as negative. Among the original hearers of the mythes, all such tests were unknown ; they had not yet learn- ed the lesson of critical disbelief; the my the passed unquestioned from the mere fact of its currency, and from its harmony with existing sentiments and preconceptions. The very circumstances which contributed to rob it of literal belief in after-time, strength- ened its hold upon the mind of the Homeric man. He looked for wonders and unusual combinations in the past ; he expected to hear of gods, heroes and men, moving and operating together upon earth ; he pictured to himself the fore-time as a theatre in which the gods interfered directly, obviously and frequently, for the protection of their favorites and the punishment of their foes. The rational conception, then only dawning in his mind, of a sys- tematic course of nature was absorbed by this fervent and lively faith. And if he could have been supplied with as perfect and philosophical a history of his own real past time, as we are now enabled to furnish with regard to the last century of England or France, faithfully recording all the successive events, and ac- counting for them by known positive laws, but introducing no special interventions of Zeus and Apollo such a history would have appeared to him not merely unholy and unimpressive, but destitute of all plausibility or title to credence. It would have provoked in him the same feeling of incredulous aversion as a description of the sun (to repeat the previous illustration) in a modern book on scientific astronomy. To us these mythes are interesting fictions ; to the Homeric and Hesiodic audience they were " rerum divinarum et huma- narum scientia," an aggregate of religious, physical and his- torical revelations, rendered more captivating, but not less true and real, by the bright coloring and fantastic shapes in which they were presented. Throughout the whole of u mythe-bearing Hel- las" 1 they formed the staple of the uninstructed Greek mind, 1 M. Ampere, in his Histoire Litteraire de la France (ch. viii. v. i. p. 310) distinguishes the Saga (which corresponds as nearly as possible with the Greek fivdos, Aoyof, ^Tt^wptof Aoyof ), as a special product of the intellect.
