iv MODERN EVOLUTION 231 



India; need not be told how the slow zigzag ad- 

 vance of man in material things has its parallel in 

 the stages of his spiritual advance all the world over ; 

 from primitive naturism, or belief in impersonal 

 Powers, through animism, or belief in spirit indwell- 

 ing in everything, to the higher conceptions of deity. 

 To this mode of progress there has been no exception, 

 as notably in the case of the Hebrews, was once 

 thought ' the correspondence between the old Israel- 

 itic and other archaic forms of theology extending to 

 details/ 



While, therefore, the discoveries of astronomers 

 and geologists have been disintegrating agencies, the 

 discoveries classed under the general term Anthropol- 

 ogical 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, Anthro- 

 pology has utterly demolished the raison d'etre of the 

 doctrine of his redemption the keystone of the fabric. 

 It has penetrated 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 com- 

 mended Bereans, ' searched* those and other scriptures, 

 finding 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, Bud- 

 dhistic, Christian and found only such differences 



