90 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



This sort of exegetical jugglery, with its allegorical, anagogic- 

 al, and tropological methods of exposition, is not confined to 

 the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, but extends to the sacred 

 books of all nations. Veda, Avesta, Tripitaka, Tao-t6-King, Ko- 

 ziki, Kur'an, Adi Granth, Kurral, and Popol Vuh have all been 

 put to the rack by hermeneutical inquisitors and made to confess 

 whatever doctrines their tormentors wished them to teach. We 

 have a striking illustration of this tendency in recent attempts to 

 deprive the Hebrew cosmogony of its true character as the terse 

 and highly poetical version of an ancient Assyrian creation myth, 

 in order to bring it into harmony with the modern theory of evo- 

 lution. 



The same fatality compels the Church in the nineteenth cen- 

 tury to observe the forms of propitiation, incantation, and conju- 

 ration which were the natural outgrowth and consistent expres- 

 sion of primitive demonolatry, but are utterly repugnant to all 

 rational conceptions of the constitution of the universe and of the 

 laws that govern it. Some years ago the writer was the guest of 

 a Catholic priest in a remote region of the Tyrol. The house was 

 a massive building of the tenth century, formerly used as a clois- 

 ter, and still adorned with portraits of the old abbots and distin- 

 guished monks who were once its inmates. Attached to it was a 

 spacious chapel which now served as the parish church. One 

 day as a severe storm was gathering the church bells began to 

 ring violently in order to affright and drive away the devils who 

 were supposed to be riding on the tempest as satellites of the 

 " prince of the power of the air," and hurling thunderbolts 

 against the habitations of men. The priest admitted that the cus- 

 tom was a relic of pagan superstition and of no efficacy what- 

 ever, denied the demonic origin of meteorological phenomena, 

 and added that the ringing of many large bells, like the firing of 

 cannon, would rather tend to produce storms by agitating the air 

 than to disperse them. " But if I should act according to my own 

 judgment and neglect this time-honored practice," he continued, 

 "I should be held morally responsible for all damage done by 

 lightning within the precincts of my parish." He placed his own 

 person and property under the protection of a lightning-rod, but 

 was constrained by his ecclesiastical affiliations to pander to medi- 

 aeval tradition, and cause the mountain valley to resound with the 

 devil-defeating clangor of consecrated bells. 



In November, 1894, it was reported that a statue of the Virgin 

 Mary at Reggio, in Calabria, had been seen opening her mouth 

 and moving her lips, and this absurd rumor attracted thousands 

 of persons, who came to present offerings and to prostrate them- 

 selves before the wonderful image, praying to be delivered from 

 the perils of earthquake and similar calamities. It is not surpris- 



