92 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



" There is something that appeals to the imagination," remarked 

 the German. " And purely a creation of the imagination, too," 

 was my reply. A conversation ensued, from which it appeared 

 that my friend regarded all religious beliefs, institutions, rites, 

 and ceremonies solely from an aesthetic and poetic point of view. 

 He even declared that it made no difference to him whether such 

 a person as Christ ever lived, and whether the popes were the 

 successors of Peter or not ; he should still be a Christian and a 

 Catholic. He admitted that all sacred literatures are more or less 

 mythical, and that our Holy Writ forms no exception to the rule. 

 With the progress of the race the old myths are refined and 

 transformed, both artistically and ethically, and thus adapted to 

 every advance in civilization, but they never die out. "The 

 masses," he added, " are mentally and morally mere children and 

 will probably always remain so, and the most interesting and 

 instructive books for children are marchen" Here was a schol- 

 arly and thoughtful man who stood wholly out of reach of " the 

 higher criticism," since he was ready to assent to its most radical 

 conclusions without the slightest change in his attitude to the 

 current system of belief. 



A mind thus constituted would regret the decay of supersti- 

 tion as a decline of ideality and a limitation of the undefined 

 and unknown regions of the supernatural, in which that errant 

 sprite, the imagination, is free to expatiate and quick to discover 

 wonders more strange than any invented by the Moor of Venice 

 to win the heart of Senator Brabantio's daughter. We fully ap- 

 preciate the poetical side of popular mythology and the unfading 

 fascination of folklore, and feel the charm that lingers in cus- 

 toms growing out of these survivals of primitive beliefs; but 

 this is another phase of the subject which can not be discussed in 

 the present paper. There are many tourists who remember Rome 

 as it was under papal rule, with its countless beggars and chronic 

 filth and perennial sources of malarial fever, and are fain to 

 lament the disappearance of these picturesque features through 

 the purification and regeneration of the ancient city. It is the 

 same sort of false sentiment that mourns over what the poet calls 



" The fair humanities of old religion," 



the loss of which has been more than made good by the marvelous 

 discoveries of modern science, whose achievements rival the an- 

 nals of credulity in their appeals to the imagination, and render 

 the visible and invisible forces of Nature, once the terror of man, 

 now tributary to his happiness. 



