and traditions of race, and has its centre, its exclusive element of life, and its impulse towards never-resting enquiry and self-perfection, in aspiration after the single living Source of all truth and morality. I am convinced that every step which we take towards a correct appreciation of the Mythical brings us nearer to that centre. The confusion of the Mythical with the Religious makes religious life centrifugal; it is the duty of the progressive tendency on this domain to confirm a centripetal tendency.[30] The recognition of this relation between pure Monotheism and the oldest historical portion of the Biblical literature does not date from yesterday or to-day; the most ideal representative of Hebrew Monotheism, in whom Jahveism as an harmonious conception of the universe attained its climax, the Prophet of the Captivity himself, described this relation in clear terms (Is. LXIII. 16; see _infra_, p. 229). But while, on the one hand, the investigation of Hebrew myths gives a stimulus to religious thought to advance in the direction of a Monotheism purified from all dross; on the other, the employment of the method offered to the Hebrew stories by Comparative Mythology in its latest stage, paves the way for a more serious treatment of the old Biblical stories. It cannot be denied that there is no little frivolity in the idea that those stories were invented at a certain time, no matter whether _bona_ or _mala fide_, by persons guided by some interest, or affected by some leaning, of their own. It is no more satisfactory to be told that the stories were not _invented_, but _sprang up_ naturally, and then to find that no answer is forthcoming to the question, _How_ that could be? The modern science of Comparative Mythology has washed the teachers of the human race clean of the suspicion of mystification and deceptive principles. The origination of the stories is, at the outset, claimed for an antiquity higher than even the most orthodox apologists could ever exhibit. Now for the first time we can learn to appreciate them as spontaneous acts of the human mind; we perceive that they arose through the same psychological process which gave us language also; that, like language itself, they were the very oldest manifestation of activity of the mind, and burst forth from it φύσει not θέσει, at the very threshold of its history; and subsequently transformed and developed themselves again quite spontaneously, on the attainment of a higher stage of civilisation, by processes of national psychology, and most certainly not by the cunning ingenuity and the worldly wisdom of certain leading classes.