filled with a narrative of the The incarnate Deity was

account of Crishna's life, is most extraordinary kind. cradled among herdsmen or shepherds. A tyrant, at the time of his birth, ordered all new-born males to be slain; and yet this new-born babe was preserved in the most wonderful manner. He performed amazing miracles in his infancy, and at the age of seven years held up a mountain on the tip of his finger; he saved multitudes by his miraculous powers; and he raised the dead. But he was the meekest and mildest of created beings; he washed the feet of the Brahmins, and preached very nobly and sublimely. He was pure; and chaste, and benevolent, and tender.

Again, to show how prone the popular imagination of the ancients was to fictions of this kind, we borrow some illustrations from the pages of Strauss. He points out that the life of a child destined for great objects, who is endangered and miraculously preserved, is one of the fundamental themes of all heroic legends, and found recurring in those of the Hebrews, the Persians, and the Romans. To say nothing of the dangers which threatened the life of Zeus, or of Hercules, and of the mode in which they were averted, something similar occurs in the histories of the infancy of Moses, in the Pentateuch-of Isaac, in a later Jewish legend-of Cyrus, in Herodotus— of Romulus, in Livy-of the childhood of the first Roman Emperor, according to Suetonius, himself living in the century that saw the birth and death of Jesusand then in that of the Christian Messiah, in the Gospel of Matthew. The idea is carried out in all these instances in a manner so similar, that it is impossible to doubt the influence of one legend upon the other, or to overlook the common psychological source of all. This

PSYCHOLOGICAL SOURCE OF THESE LEGENDS. 13

source is that peculiar propensity, which leads men to make the value of a good or great man the more sensibly felt, by setting forth on one side the near approach of his possible loss, and on the other the care of Providence for his preservation. The combined influence of the twothat is to say, the inherent desire to enhance the value of what was esteemed, and the multiplicity of the examples around-may well account for these fables of imminent danger and supernatural protection, as introduced into the life of Jesus.

In the record of the infancy of Jesus, the mode in which the danger is brought about is also peculiar. The cause of it is a Star, which appears in Heaven and guides certain Eastern Magi to Jerusalem, where their enquiries after the new born King of the Jews attract the attention of Herod the Great. Thus the Star appears as the means of the endangerment of Jesus' life. Still, this portion of the legend had an object of its own. There is a belief reaching from remote antiquity even to our own times, that new appearances of stars, particularly comets, coming unexpectedly and vanishing again, prognosticate revolutions in human affairs, and the birth and death of great men. Men start from the supposition, that so striking a phenomenon in the Heavens must have, corresponding to it, a similar one on earth, affecting mankind. Thus, when an historical event happens, which it is wished particularly to distinguish, some extraordinary natural phenomenon, that never took place, is invented to chime in with it. Thus we read in Rubeni, a rabbinical author, that at the moment of Abraham's birth, a star stood in the East, which swallowed up four other stars, each appearing in one of the four quarters of the Heavens. Justin also tells another of these fictitious

tales about Mithridates, to the effect that in the year in which he was born, and in that of his accession, a comet appeared, and continued visible on each occasion for four hours during every day, and for seventy successive days. It was of so large a size, and so bright, that it occupied a quarter of the sky, and outshone the brightness of the sun. Before the birth of Augustus, it was said to have been prognosticated at Rome, by a prodigy, that Nature was pregnant of a King for the Roman people. According to Jewish writings, the account of the peril which threatened the life of the Lawgiver, had its parallel also in the history of the Patriarch of the nation. In this case Pharoah is Nimrod. In one account, Nimrod sees a star in a dream; this star, according to the other account, actually appears in the sky, and his sages explain it to him to mean that a son is at that moment born to Tharah, from whom shall come a mighty nation destined to inherit the present and the future world. Observe also that when, at length, the same embellishment had been introduced into the history of the infancy of Jesus, it was introduced into the history of the infancy of John the Baptist, who, having been endangered by the massacre at Bethlehem, was also said to have been preserved by a miracle.

Now, in the legends of Cyrus, Romulus and Abraham, the tyrants give special orders for murdering only the children who are pointed out as dangerous to them. The narratives concerning Moses, Augustus, and Jesus, resemble each other in this-that the potentates seek to catch the destined infant, who is unknown to them personally, in a wide net, together with others. The story, then, in relation to the wholesale massacre by Herod, is totally unworthy of credence or historical consideration, as before

INCREDIBLE STATEMENTS OF OLD TESTAMENT. 15

remarked. Neither will it stand the test of criticism, when considered in relation to the justice and omniscience of the Almighty: for if God specially interposed to blind the mind of Herod by suggesting to the Magi that they should not return to Jerusalem to notify him of the circumstances, why did He not inspire them to proceed, in the first instance, direct to Bethlehem? Herod would thus have been in ignorance of the child's existence, and this cruel and unnecessary massacre would have been entirely avoided that is, if it ever occurred.

The date, when these fables were introduced into the New Testament, is not of much importance, even if it were possible to discover it. We know, however, that the early Christians not only accepted the mythology of Moses, but that they superadded a mythology of their own, of which these extraordinary stories form a part, and that the result of the union was a system of theology or belief, in which the teachings of Moses and the Apostles and Jesus were blended, and for upwards of fourteen hundred years-not improperly called the "Dark Ages," were taught and accepted as a part and parcel of Christianity. No one, during these dark ages, was allowed to separate the history and the mythology from the doctrine. They were denied the liberty of rejecting the one and accepting the other, under the severest penalties in this world, and the threat of eternal damnation

in the next. He who accepted the doctrines of Christianity was compelled also to accept, or pretend so to do, the most senseless fables and theories that were presented to him, or be anathematized. He was required to believe the most incredible statements; among them, that this earth, together with the planetary system of which it is a member, was created only about four thousand years

before the birth of Jesus. Even as late as toward the end of the fifteenth century Columbus, the discoverer of this continent, was excommunicated and branded as a heretic, by one of the boasted successors of St. Peter, for advancing the theory that the earth is spherical, in opposition to the idea that it is a mere extended plane.

It was also incumbent that he should believe a thousand other absurdities; that the Sun revolved round the Earth; that God dwells in a local habitation, a place called Heaven, and the Devil in a place called Hell; that God made a man and a woman, and placed them in a garden, intending that they and their progeny should live forever in this world-happy, innocent, naked, and having nothing to do; that in this purpose, however, God was thwarted by Satan, or the Devil, who, in the form of a serpent, persuaded the woman to eat of the fruit of a tree called the Tree of Knowledge, of which God had forbidden them to eat, under penalty of death; that they did eat, and that they fell from their state of innocence, happiness and nudity; that God, offended at their disobedience, drove them out of the garden, imposed labor upon them as a curse, and taught them the use of clothes; that the first two men, born of this original pair, quarrelled because God was better pleased to accept a sacrifice of fat cattle roasted with fire upon an altar, from Abel, than a bloodless offering of herbs and fruits from Cain, and that Cain, therefore, slew his brother in a fit of anger; that the race of men, born of Adam and Eve, becoming utterly corrupt and wicked, God repented that he had made such ungrateful and abominable creatures, and resolved to drown the whole race of men, as well as the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air, which had not offended Him; that He spared but one man and his family saved