76 BY-WAYS AND BIRD-NO TES. 



they are not dead or banished. For our pres' 

 ent purpose let us admit that time -was when 

 nature, the great generator o£ mysteries, dis- 

 closed immortal beings to man. Were these 

 beings necessarily, because immortal, omnipo- 

 tent or superhuman in their powers ? I 

 should say they probably were possessed of 

 more than human potency in certain ways. 

 Immortality, even when robbed of everything 

 but the death-resisting principle, is in some 

 way very nearly married to invisibility in our 

 idea of it. The power of rendering itself in- 

 visible to human eyes, that is, the ability to 

 make itself a nonentity to all appearances, is 

 an attribute of every imaginable god, or at 

 least of every god at all like those of the Greek 

 and Latin mythologies. 



Now suppose certain beings, born of a mys- 

 terious play of nature, possessed of these two 

 things, immortality and the power of rendering 

 themselves invisible, and what more is needed 

 as a basis upon which to build the fabric of 

 heathen polytheism ? Why not, then, take the 

 so-called gods to have been a race of such 

 immortals, without any other attributes of the 

 true Theos in them ? If such they were, how 

 natural for human imagination, operated upon 

 by the subtle influences of awe and wonder, to 

 add the rest. Indeed it seems to me hardly 

 fair, this laughing to scorn the beautiful theol- 

 ogy of the ancients without so much as giving 

 it the benefit of a charitable doubt, and with- 

 out even admitting that it may have rested on 

 a venial mistake arising out of some manifes- 

 tations of nature now withdrawn or in abey- 

 ance. But the gods may have been immaterial, 

 in the common sense, and yet not immortal in 



