76 BY-WAYS AND BIRD-NOTES. | 
they are not dead or banished. For our pres- 
ent purpose let us admit that time was when 
nature, the great generator of mysteries, dis- 
closed immortal beings to man. Were these 
beings necessarily, because immortal, omnipo- 
tent or superhuman in their powers? I 
should say they probably were possessed of | 
more than human potency in certain ways. 
Immortality, even when robbed of everything 
but the death-resisting principle, is in some 
way very nearly married to invisibility in our 
idea of it. The power of rendering itself in- 
visible to human eyes, thatis, the ability to 
make itself a nonentity to all appearances, is 
an attribute of every imaginable god, or at 
least of every god at all like those of the Greek 
and Latin mythologies. | 
Now suppose certain beings, born of a mys- 
terious play of nature, possessed of these two 
things, immortality and the power of rendering 
themselves invisible, and what more is needed 
asa basis upon which to build the fabric of 
heathen polytheism? Why not, then, take the 
so-called gods to have been a race of such 
immortals, without any other attributes of the 
true Zieos in them? If such they were, how 
natural for human imagination, operated upon 
by the subtle influences of awe and wonder, to 
add the rest. Indeed it seems to me hardly 
fair, this laughing to scorn the beautiful theol- 
ogy of the ancients without so much as giving 
it the benef’ of a charitable doubt, and with- 
cut even admitting that it may have rested on 
a venial mistake arising out of some manifes- 
tations of nature now withdrawn or in abey- 
ance. But the gods may have been immaterial, 
in the common sense, and yet not immortal in 
