"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 märchen." Here was a scholarly 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 superstition 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 appreciate the poetical side of popular mythology and the unfading fascination of folklore, and feel the charm that lingers in customs 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 annals 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.
