146 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



It is principally because, aside from a few fugitive notions, often quite 

 obsolete, on the mythology of Greek and Latin antiquity, the history 

 of religious is wholly unprovided for in our courses of instruction ; 

 and, secondly, because there prevails a mass of prejudices tending to 

 restrict the application of scientific methods to this study. 



Among these prejudices there are some which are always found, 

 although in a less degree, in all the subdivisions of historical science, 

 while others are peculiar to this particular branch. Some of them 

 tend to hinder even the existence of hierography, while others simply 

 falsify its applications or vitiate its conclusions. My object is to point 

 out the most formidable of these prepossessions by exhibiting, through 

 a few examples, the mistakes into which they may cause even the best- 

 intentioned persons to fall. 



We will begin with examining some prejudices that are connected 

 with the very object of our study — the religious and the anti-religious 

 prejudice. It should be understood that when I use the word preju- 

 dice in this connection, I employ it in its etymological sense of a judg- 

 ment fixed in advance, and not in the ordinary sense of something 

 offensive. Our purpose is to study religions, not to insult them. 



Max Miiller has written that there have existed two systems broad 

 enough to tolerate a history of religions — primitive Buddhism and 

 Christianity. He doubtless meant Christianity as he professes it, and 

 as he saw it professed around him — the Christianity of Stanley and Co- 

 lenso, of Maurice and Martineau, of Kuenen and Tiele, of Reville and 

 Lenorraant. He does not hesitate to recognize with what facility one 

 may be led away from the historical method by belief in the posses- 

 sion of a supernatural revelation, when this revelation is formulated by 

 the agency of a man of reputed infallibility, of a church assembled in 

 council, or of a book finished and closed forever : when it pretends to 

 trace around its affirmations a circle impenetrable to free examination, 

 it is wanting in the most essential conditions for passing serious criti- 

 cism. When the believer's right to interpret the sacred books is ac- 

 knowledged, a place is left open for exegesis, but that exegesis still 

 remains the slave of particular texts or dogmas that limit and con- 

 sequently trammel it. 



Let us take a single story from the Bible — that of Jonah, and ex- 

 amine the different acceptations it has received. We could hardly find 

 a richer stock of interpretations vitiated by what I call the religious 

 prejudice. According to the rationalist mode of interpretation that 

 flourished in Germany at the beginning of this century, Jonah was an 

 envoy from Israel to Nineveh, who was picked up after having been 

 shipwrecked, three days from the shore, by a ship carrying the image 

 of a whale as its figure-head. Another interpretation is that of Grimm, 

 that the whole history passed off in a dream. This is to save the letter, 

 but at the expense of the spirit. The important matter in the critical 

 study of a text is to find what its authors intended to put in it, and 



