nowhere, perhaps, is the criminality of human progress more ostentatiously recognized than in the Latin classics. Witness the quaint conservatism ascribed by Horace to the gods, Odes, i. 3, where it is hinted that he who first entrusted his frail bark to the waves committed a sin against their majesty, that they had meant the sea to keep men apart and not to be a highway of intercourse:
'Nequicquam deus abscidit
Prudens Oceano dissociabili
Terras, si taraen impiae
Non tangenda rates transiliunt vada.'
But I may be charged with forgetting the most remarkable parallel of all, to wit, that in the Hebrew Scriptures, where, instead of the intoxicating soma, or the draught from the deep well of wisdom, or the cauldron of science and regeneration, we are told of a tree with a knowledge-giving crop of forbidden fruit, whereof it was a crime for man to taste, while he who induced him to commit it, is represented as a reptile, as a serpent to have his head bruised. This would, however, involve the discussion of Semitic questions, the settling of which is neither within my competence nor in any way essential to the understanding of the history of Aryan religion. Let it suffice that the course of that history is intelligible in itself; that it is, on the whole, a history of progress; and that, so far as we have been able to study it in these lectures, it may briefly be summed up thus: some of the Celts of antiquity, as also of the Teutons and the Hindus, avenged themselves in their own time on the narrowness of the divine creatures of their ancestors' imagination by
