50 PROFESSOR BLACKIE ON INTERPRETATION OF POPULAR MYTHS, 



or less superficial. The testimony of the Greeks, therefore, with regard to the 

 supposed identity of certain personages in their Pantheon with certain gods or 

 goddesses in the Egyptian or Phoenician, and their consequent foreign extrac- 

 tion, will require to be examined with the severest scrutiny. 



XXX. In deriving any god from a foreign source, even though his foreign 

 origin should appear in some respects perfectly certain, we must not conclude 

 that all the phenomena which his person and character present are to be 

 explained from abroad. Nothing is more natural than that he should be 

 a compound god, one half native and one half foreign, or even a monstrous 

 conglomerate of many gods. 



XXXI. Of all the foreign sources to which the Hellenic mythology has at 

 different times been referred by the learned, Egypt is at once the most reputable 

 and the least likely. For here we have neither original connection by identity 

 of stock, nor any such commercial or political action of the more ancient over 

 the more modern people, as would lead to the importation of religious ideas. 

 The ancient Greeks had a great respect, and a sort of awful reverence for the 

 wisdom and the antiquity of the Egyptians ; but this respect and reverence was 

 more likely to lead them, as in fact it often did, to the recognition of super- 

 ficial resemblances (as in the case of Io and Isis), than to the trace of original 

 identity. Modern researches have added nothing to the probability of the 

 favourite notion of Bryant and Blackwell, that the principal persons and 

 legends of Hellenic mythology came directly from the land of Ham. 



XXXII. For the Hebrew origin of some of the Greek theological ideas — the 

 darling notion of Church Fathers and Protestant theologians, and which has 

 been recently revived by a statesman of distinguished character, talent, and 

 erudition — there is even less to be said. For, in the first place, here we 

 are comparing a polytheistic system with a monotheistic, where antagonism 

 rather than similarity is to be looked for ; the elements of original or super- 

 induced connection between the two peoples are altogether wanting ; and the 

 original unity of the human family, which is the only link that binds the Greek 

 to the Jew, is so remote that it requires no inconsiderable amount of hardihood 

 to drag them into the arena of the present comparison. This hardihood, how- 

 ever, has never been wanting ; and besides its own virtue, has always found 

 great favour with the religious public, which is pleased with nothing so much 

 as the idea that everything good, beautiful, or excellent in any way that 

 heathen religions may be allowed to possess must have come either from the 

 Hebrew Scriptures directly, or from some more ancient source of primeval 

 revelation. And no doubt there may be a certain truth in this view ; but it is 



