THEORY OF DIRECT CREATION. 19 



and unconsciously adopted most of the scientific 

 errors of their time, and when we find that 

 not only the Apostles, but Jesus himself, never 

 seem to have called in question the charac- 

 ters of the Jewish national heroes (many of 

 whom were very bad men, and others purely 

 mythological characters,*) but preferred to 

 attack the vices of their own time, rather than 

 those of the past, we ought not to feel sur- 

 prised at their tacit acceptance of the Hebrew 

 cosmogony, which it was still less in accord- 

 ance with their mission to correct, even if we 

 assume, in direct contradiction to the repeated 

 assertions of Jesus,*^ that he and his followers 

 were miraculously exempt from errors of every 

 kind. 



In early times, when men had sufficiently ad- 

 vanced in religious thought to connect the 

 origin of the world with their gods, the next 

 question which would arise would be, " How 

 did the gods make the w r orld ? " What more 



* Where this is not immediately obvious in the legends themselves, 

 it is discernible from other independent and legitimate sources. Thus, 

 on the strength of particulars given in some Hebrew commentaries res- 

 pecting Noah, some German critics have regarded him as a solar 

 hero. 



t Mark x. 18, xiii. 32 



C 2 



