250 



PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION. 



and geologists have been disintegrating agencies 

 upon old beliefs, the discoveries classed under the 

 general term Anthropological are acting as more 

 powerful solvents on every opinion of the past. 

 Showing on what mythical foundation the story of 

 the fall of man rests, Anthropology has utterly de- 

 molished the raison d'etre of the doctrine of his re- 

 demption the keystone of the fabric. It has pene- 

 trated the mists of antiquity, and traced the myth of 

 a forfeited Paradise, of the Creation, the Deluge, and 

 other legends, to their birthplaces in the valley of 

 the Euphrates or the uplands of Persia; legends 

 whose earliest inscribed records are on Accadian 

 tablets, or in the scriptures of Zarathustra. It has 

 in the spirit of the commended Bereans, " searched " 

 those and other scriptures, rinding therein legends 

 of founders of ancient faiths cognate to those which 

 in the course of the centuries gathered round Jesus 

 of Nazareth; it has collated the rites and ceremonies 

 of many a barbaric theology with those of old-world 

 religions Brahmanic, Buddhistic, Christian and 

 found only such differences between them as are 

 referable to the higher or the lower culture. For 

 the history of superstitions is included in the history 

 of beliefs; the superstitions being the germ-plasm of 

 which all beliefs above the lowest are the modified 

 products. Belief incarnates itself in word or act. In 

 the one we have the charm, the invocation, and the 

 dogma; in the other the ritual and ceremony. "A 

 ritual system," Professor Robertson Smith remarks, 



