V MR. GLADSTONE AND GENESIS 181 



either more, or less, scientific importance than 

 may be allotted to these. 



Mr. Gladstone's definition of a sermon permits 

 me to suspect that he may not see much difference 

 between that form of discourse and what I call a 

 myth ; and I hope it may be something more than 

 the slowness of apprehension, to which I have 

 confessed, which leads me to imagine that a 

 statement which is " general " but " admits excep- 

 tions," which is " popular " and " aims mainly at 

 producing moral impression," "summary" and 

 therefore open to " criticism of detail," amounts to 

 a myth, or perhaps less than a myth. Put 

 algebraically, it comes to this, x = a + b -f c ; always 

 remembering that there is nothing to show the 

 exact value of either a, or b, or c. It is true that 

 a is commonly supposed to equal 10, but there 

 are exceptions, and these may reduce it to 8, or 3, 

 or ; b also popularly means 10, but being chiefly 

 used by the algebraist as a " moral " value, you 

 cannot do much with it in the addition or subtrac- 

 tion of mathematical values ; c also is quite " sum- 

 mary," and if you go into the details of which it 

 is made up, many of them may be wrong, and their 

 sum total equal to 0, or even to a minus quantity. 



Mr. Gladstone appears to wish that I should (1) 

 enter upon a sort of essay competition with the 

 author of the pentateuchal cosmogony ; (2) that I 

 should make a further statement about some ele- 

 mentary facts in the history of Indian and Greek 



