Xiterar^ (Sutbe

AND RATIONALIST REVIEW.

[ESTABLISHED 1885.]

No. 24. (N ew S er ie s .)

JUNE i, 1898.

Monthly ; T wopence.

Contents.

Of t h e G rowth of Myths. Uy J . McCabe . . 81 T h e N a t u r e -Id ea, liy Charles E. Hooper . . 82 W ill W omen H e l p ? By F. J. Gould . . - 8 3 T h e F atal Rainbow : The Polychrome B ib le . .83 M r. M allock’s N ew Boor : Aristocracy and E vo lu t io n 84 A Rational J e s u s . . . . . - 8 5 T heology as a S tr ic t ly N atural S c i e n c e . . 86 T h e C h ild r en ’s G uide . . . . . 8 7 S igns and W arnings . . . . . 8 7 Random J ottings . . . . . . 88 Chats A bout Books and M iscellanea. XII.—W ith t h e R ev . J ohn Page Hopps .

. . . 8 9

Rationalism in the Magazines

. . . 9 1

Quarterly and Monthly Magazines . . 92 S hort Notices .... ■ . 92 Our L e t t e r -box . . . . . - 9 3

©f tbc <3rowtb of T h e analysis of the myths which have grown, by a kind of historical accretion, around the lives of all great religious reformers is a familiar study to the modern Rationalist. Christians delight in tracing the natural origin of the myths which have clung to the life of Buddha ; Buddhists, equally convinced of the literal truth of their own legends, exercise their mythological faculty upon the life of Christ; the Zoroastrian calmly divests both Buddha and Christ of their mythical vesture; and the Confucian strips Zoroaster himself in turn. The Rationalist, having no theory and no priesthood to support, discerns the mythical element in all their Christologies. He applies the principle of these rival theologians with disinterested impartiality, and detects the same mythopoeic faculty at work in the earlier stages of every great religion. I f certain features of the legendary life of Buddha, of Zoroaster, or of Mohammed, conflict violently with all known experience, and are unsupported by reliable documentary evidence, he rejects them, as the Christian does ; but he goes on to eliminate the miraculous features from the traditional life of Christ on precisely the same criterion. .

Now, it is frequently objected that, whereas an interval is found between the deaths of Confucius, Zoroaster, Buddha, and Mohammed and the appearance of their legendary biographies, sufficient to account for the growth of myths in those instances, such an interval is inadmissible in the case of Christ. The average student of the chronology of the New Testament will assign to the earliest Gospel a date towards the end of the first century. Christ is believed to have died about the year 30 ; hence we have an interval of little more than half a century for the formation of the ample and remarkable life of Christ which is offered even in Mark or Matthew. This, we are often told, is entirely insufficient to support the Rationalistic theory ; and much time is wasted in abstract speculations upon the growth of myths. A few grains of fact are proverbially destructive of cart-loads of logic ; and to one who is familiar with Roman Catholic hagiography such facts occur in abundance. In the lives of mediaeval saints the growth of myths may be studied to great advantage; and it will be found that that growth is often prodigiously rapid—infinitely more rapid than in the case of the Gospels. The present writer fails to see any satisfactory evidence that the mythical features of Christ’s life were accepted much before the middle of the second century. However, even if we admit the contention that only half a century elapsed before the public and official acceptance of the present Gospels, we shall find in much less remote times startling examples of the rapid growth of myths. Let us take the life of St. Antony of l ’adua as an example—a life which, to any but a Romanist of the most credulous type, is invested with a colossal growth of myths and legends.

Antony of Padua was a Portuguese friar (Italian by adoption) of the thirteenth century. He was one of the earliest followers of Francis o f Assisi, and his life seems to have been one of singular purity, nobleness, and beneficence, in the light of the received ideal of life. He died in the year 12 3 1 , at a very early age, and after only ten years of public activity. Now, the significance of the example lies in this, that the whole mass of incredible, and sometimes ludicrous, miracles had gathered round the simple facts of his life, and had been solemnly pronounced to be historical and true by the Pope, after a severe juridical inquiry, w ith in tw elve months a ft e r h is death. The details of the story are remarkable. After a prolonged struggle (which nearly ended in a sanguinary encounter) between the inhabitants of Capo del Ponte and the Paduans for the possession of the body, it was at length interred, and the whole country was soon flooded with outrageous legends of miracles. A deputation, consisting of two friars, two canons, and four nobles of the city, with a petition from the doctors of the university, was sent to Rome to demand Antony’s canonization. The Pope said that an assembly of cardinals had already favourably reported on the case, and he at once ordered the Cardinal-bishop o f Abbeville to repair to Padua and institute a strict inquiry on the spot, with witnesses, devil’s advocate, and the whole juridical paraphernalia. The judge promptly gave a favourable verdict, the assembly of cardinals examined and ratified it, and the Pope decreed the canonization of the saint on May 30th—just eleven and a-half months after his death. In the presence o f the Pope and cardinals at Spoleto the long list of miracles was solemnly read and ratified. It included the restoration of three dead persons to life (a miracle which has, unfortunately, become entirely extinct), the healing of seven blind, three deaf, and seven incurable and “ horribly deformed” sufferers, and a host of legends which are quite as interesting as any in the life of Christ.

Here we have an historical example of the growth of myths (and it has innumerable parallels) which is more instructive than volumes o f speculation on the subject. I f a vast body of myths—for Antony is credited with more miracles than Christ himself, and they are equally startling —could cling so securely to a revered personage in so short a time, how shall we hesitate before the half century, at least, that elapsed between the death of Christ and the appearance of the Gospels ? Are we, who decline to accept the miracles of Christ, in view of that interval, more stubborn and prepossessed than the hundreds of millions of Christians who reject the miracles of Antony of Padua ? There can be no doubt that we have in this, and in the lives of many of the Romanist saints, a useful illustration of the growth of myths. And, when we remember that the Paduan mythswere original, whereas the Christian myths already existed in pre-Christian religions, that thePaduan myths grewonthe^scene of Antony’s labours, whereas the scene of Christ’s labours was a desert-