had joined with ethics, and religion as a moral power was holding sway over society.

Animism, or the theory of souls, has thus been shown as the principle out of which arose the various systems of spirits and deities, in barbaric and ancient religions, and it has been noticed also, how already among rude races such beliefs begin to act on moral conduct. We here see under their simplest aspects the two sides of religion, its philosophical and its moral side, which the reader should keep steadily in view in further study of the faiths of the world. In looking at the history of a religion, he will have to judge how far it has served these two great purposes-on the one hand that of teaching man how to think of himself, the world around him, the awful boundless power pervading all-on the other hand that of practically guiding and strengthening him in the duties of life. One question the student will often ask himself—how it is that faiths once mighty and earnest fall into decay and others take their place. Of course to no small extent such changes have come by conquest, as where in Persia the religion of Mohammed well nigh stamped out the old Zoroastrian faith of Cyrus and Darius. But the sword of the conqueror is only a means by which religions have been set up and put down in the world by main force, and there are causes lying deeper in men's minds. It needs but a glance through history at the wrecks of old religions to see how they failed from within. The priests of Egypt, who once represented the most advanced knowledge of their time, came to fancy that mankind had no more to learn, and upheld their tradition against all newer wisdom, till the world passed them by and left them grovelling in superstition. The priests of Greece ministered in splendid temples and had their fill of wealth and honours, but men who sought the secret of a good life found that this was not

the business of the sanctuary, and turned away to the philosophers. Unless a religion can hold its place in the front of science and of morals, it may only gradually, in the course of ages, lose its place in the nation, but all the power of statecraft and all the wealth of the temples will not save it from eventually yielding to a belief that takes in higher knowledge and teaches better life.

CHAPTER XV.

HISTORY AND MYTHOLOGY.

Tradition, 373-Poetry, 375-Fact in Fiction, 377-Earliest Poems and Writings, 381-Ancient Chronicle and History, 383-Myths, 387— Interpretation of Myths, 396—Diffusion of Myths, 397.

HISTORY is no longer looked to for a record of the earliest ages of man. As the first chapter of this volume shows,

we moderns know what was hidden from the ancients themselves about the still more ancient ancients. Yet it does not at all follow that ancient history has lost its value. On the contrary, there are better means than ever of confirming what is really sound in it by such evidence as that of antiquities and language, while masses of very early writings are now newly opened to the historian. It was never more necessary to have clear ideas of what tradition, poetry, and written records can teach as to the times when history begins.

The early history of nations consists more or less of traditions handed down by memory from ages before writing. Our own experience does not tell us much as to what such oral tradition may be worth, for it has so fallen out of use in the civilised world, that now one knows little of what happened beyond one's great-grandfather's time, unless it has been written down. But writing has not yet quite

overspread the globe, and there are still peoples left whose whole history is the tradition of their ancestors. Thus the South Sea Islanders, who till quite lately had no writing, were intelligent barbarians, much given to handing down recollections of bygone days, and in one or two cases which it has been possible to test among them, it seems as though memory may really keep a historical record long and correctly. It is related by Mr. Whitmee the missionary that in the island of Rotuma there was a very old tree, under which according to tradition, the stone seat of a famous chief had been buried; this tree was lately blown down, and, sure enough, there was a stone seat under its roots, which must have been out of sight for centuries. In the Ellice group, the natives declared that their ancestors came from a valley in the distant island of Samoa generations before, and they preserved an old worm-eaten staff, pieced to hold it together, which in their assemblies the orator held in his hand as the sign of having the right to speak; this staff was lately taken to Samoa, and proved to be made of wood that grew there, while the people of the valley in question had a tradition of a great party going out to sea exploring, who never came back. Among these Polynesian traditions the best known are those handed down by the Maoris as to the peopling of New Zealand by their ancestors. They tell how, after a civil war, their forefathers migrated in canoes from Hawaiki in the far north-east; they give the names of the builders and crews of these vessels and show the places where they landed; they repeat, generation by generation, the names of the chiefs descended from those who came in the canoes, by which they reckon about eighteen generations, or 400 to 500 years, since their taking possession of the islands. Notwithstanding that, as might be expected, the traditions of various districts disagree a good deal, they

are admitted as the title-deeds by which the natives hold land in the right of their ancestors who landed in the canoes Shark (Arawa) and God's-Eye (Mata-atua), and it can hardly be doubted that such genealogies, constantly repeated among people whose lands depended on them, are founded on fact. Yet these Maori traditions are about half made up of the wildest wonder-tales; when the builder of one of the canoes cuts down a great tree to make the hull, on coming back to the forest next morning he finds that the tree has got up again in the night; and when the canoe is finished and puts to sea, a certain magician is left behind, but on getting to New Zealand there he is before them on the shore, having come across the ocean on the back of a sea-monster, like Arion on his dolphin. These traditions of a modern barbarous people may give us not an unfair idea of the mixture of real memory and mythic fancy in the early history of Egypt or Greece, where it has come down by tradition from the distant past when there was as yet no scribe to engrave on a stone tablet even the names of kings.

Traditions are yet more lasting when handed down in fixed words, which is especially when the poets have set them in verse. Even now in England some notable event may be made into a ballad and sung through the length and breadth of the land. In days before printing, the importance of the poet as historian was far greater, and many an old European chant has touches of true chronicle. The old songs of Brittany are often very true to history, as where in one there is mention of Bertrand du Guesclin's hair being like a lion's mane, and in another, Jeanne de Montfort (Jeanne-la-Flamme) going forth from Hennebont with sword and burning brand to fire the French camp, is described as putting on her suit of armour, which history