184 MYTH AND SCIENCE. 



much more remote from direct contact with men. 

 The conception of the immortal gods included one 

 supreme power, formative, protecting or avenging, and 

 this conception bordered on the Semitic idea of the 

 absolute Being, although without quite attaining to it. 

 God was confounded with the order of things, his laws 

 were those of the universe, by which he was also 

 bound, and the righteous man lived in conformity 

 with these laws. When Christianity began, pagan 

 rationalism had arrived at the idea of a spiritual 

 and directing power, organically identical with the 

 universe. It was neither the Olympus of the common 

 people, nor the Semitic Jehovah, but rather the 

 conscious and inevitable order of nature. Although, 

 either as an 01}*mpus or as a dogma, the deity was 

 confounded with men or constrained them to follow 

 a more rational rule of life, yet paganism clearly 

 distinguished the gods from men in their concrete 

 personality, and the action of humanity was therefore 

 distinct from that of the deity. 



" When Christianity began, the peoples of the 

 Aryan race in Europe, or at least those of more 

 advanced civilization, had constituted for themselves 

 a heavenly Pantheon, which contained nearly all the 

 primitive deities, but in a more human form and 

 exercising a juster rule over the world, while at the 

 same time they were regarded as quite distinct from 

 the society of men. Although there was in this 

 multiplicity of divine forms an hierarchical order of 



