________________
LECTURE IV.
205
of more abstract terms, are we even now better than children trying to place a ladder against the sky?
The parler enfantin in religion is not extinct; it never will be. Not only have some of the ancient childish religions been kept alive, as, for instance, the religion of India, which is to my mind like a halffossilised megatherion walking about in the broad daylight of the nineteenth century; but in our own religion and in the language of the New Testament, there are many things which disclose their true meaning to those only who know what language is made of, who have not only ears to hear, but a heart to understand the real meaning of parables.
What I maintain, then, is this, that as we put the most charitable interpretation on the utterances of children, we ought to put the same charitable interpretation on the apparent absurdities, the follies, the errors, nay, even the horrors of ancient religion. When we read of Belus, the supreme god of the Babylonians, cutting off his head, that the blood flowing from it might be mixed with the dust out of which man was to be formed, this sounds horrible enough; but depend upon it what was originally intended by this myth was no more than this, that there is in man an element of Divine life: that we are also His blood, or His offspring.
The same idea existed in the ancient religion of the Egyptians, for we read in the 17th chapter of their Ritual, that the Sun mutilated himself, and that from the stream of his blood he created all beings? And
1 Vicomte de Rougé, in Annales de Philosophie chrétienne,' Nov, 1869, p. 332,
