From Kapila, the Hindu philosopher, who many centuries before Christ demurred to the claim of the mystic Yogins, that in ecstasy a man has the power of seeing Deity face to face and conversing with the “highest” beings, down to the Voltaireans of the eighteenth century, who laughed at everything that was held sacred by other people, each age had its unbelieving Thomases. Did they ever succeed in checking the progress of truth? No more than the ignorant bigots who sat in judgment over Galileo checked the progress of the earth’s rotation. No exposures whatever are able to vitally affect the stability or instability of a belief which humanity inherited from the first races of men, those, {122} who—if we can believe in the evolution of spiritual man as in that of the physical one—had the great truth from the lips of their ancestors, the _gods of their fathers_, “that were on the other side of the flood.” The identity of the Bible with the legends of the Hindu sacred books and the cosmogonies of other nations, must be demonstrated at some future day. _The fables of the mythopœic ages will be found to have but allegorized the greatest truths of geology and anthropology._ It is in these ridiculously expressed fables that science will have to look for her “missing links.” Otherwise, whence such strange “coincidences” in the respective histories of nations and peoples so widely thrown apart? Whence that identity of primitive conceptions which, fables and legends though they are termed now, contain in them nevertheless the kernel of historical facts, of a truth thickly overgrown with the husks of popular embellishment, but still a truth? Compare only this verse of _Genesis_ vi.: “And it came to pass, when _men began to multiply_ on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose.... There were _giants in the earth in those days_,” etc., with this part of the Hindu cosmogony, in the _Vedas_, which speaks of the descent of the Brahmans. The first Brahman complains of being _alone_ among all his brethren without a wife. Notwithstanding that the Eternal advises him to devote his days solely to the study of the Sacred Knowledge (_Veda_), the _first-born_ of mankind insists. Provoked at such ingratitude, the eternal gave Brahman a wife of the race of the _Daints_, or _giants_, from whom all the Brahmans maternally descend. Thus the entire Hindu priesthood is descended, on the one hand, from the _superior_ spirits (the sons of God), and from _Daintany_, a daughter of the earthly giants, the primitive men.[222] “And they bare children to them; the same became mighty men which were of old; men of renown.”[223]