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CONFLUENCE OF OPPOSITES
153
153
FIFTH LECTURE. MYTHOLOGY.
(A) This evening's lecture deals with a subject which is of the utmost importance to the proper study of Religion and, therefore, also to the humanity at large. We are going to explore today the region of mythology wbich bas denied the best attempts of the moderns at unravelment. The greatest confusion has hitherto prevailed amongst the propounders of the sacred text, and scholarship, both autochthonous and foreign has been only knocking its head against a dead wall. For some have perceived in the gods of the different countries and pantheons real actual beings and in their strange doings and impossible relationships, irrefutable evidence of their superhuman nature, while others who have either had no superstitions 10 warp their judgment or who have shaken themselves free of them, by education, or otherwise, have taken these innumerable gods and goddesses to be personifications of such natural phenomena as light, rain, fire and the like, or of different kinds of sciences and arts, the art of governing people, the culinary art, etc. etc. But to each and every one of these learned scholars have the Vedas,' the Holy Bible and the Zend Avesta remained a sealed book.
The Orientalist thinks that he has a complete solution of the mystery as soon as be has identified Vedic
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