While Prehistoric Archæology, with its enormous mass of _material_ remains gathered from "dens and caves of the earth," from primitive work-shops, from rude tombs and temples, thus adds its testimony to the "great cloud of witnesses"; _immaterial_ remains, potent as embodying the thought of man, are brought by the twin sciences of Comparative Mythology and Folklore, and Comparative Theology--remains of paramount value, because existing to this day in hitherto unsuspected form, as survivals in beliefs and rites and customs. Readers of Tylor's Primitive Culture, with its wealth of facts and their significance; and of Lyall's Asiatic Studies, wherein is described the making of myths to this day in the heart of India; need not be told how the slow zigzag advance of man in material things has its parallel in the stages of his intellectual and spiritual advance all the world over; from the lower animism to the higher conception of deity; from bewildering guesses to assuring certainties. To this mode of progress no civilized people has been the exception, as notably in the case of the Hebrews, was once thought--"the correspondence between the old Israelitic and other archaic forms of theology extending to details." While, therefore, the discoveries of astronomers and geologists have been disintegrating agencies upon old beliefs, the discoveries classed under the general term Anthropological are acting as more powerful solvents on every opinion of the past. Showing on what mythical foundation the story of the fall of man rests, Anthropology has utterly demolished the _raison d'être_ of the doctrine of his redemption--the keystone of the fabric. It has penetrated the mists of antiquity, and traced the myth of a forfeited Paradise, of the Creation, the Deluge, and other legends, to their birthplaces in the valley of the Euphrates or the uplands of Persia; legends whose earliest inscribed records are on Accadian tablets, or in the scriptures of Zarathustra. It has in the spirit of the commended Bereans, "searched" those and other scriptures, finding therein legends of founders of ancient faiths cognate to those which in the course of the centuries gathered round Jesus of Nazareth; it has collated the rites and ceremonies of many a barbaric theology with those of old-world religions--Brahmanic, Buddhistic, Christian--and found only such differences between them as are referable to the higher or the lower culture. For the history of superstitions is included in the history of beliefs; the superstitions being the germ-plasm of which all beliefs above the lowest are the modified products. Belief incarnates itself in word or act. In the one we have the charm, the invocation, and the dogma; in the other the ritual and ceremony. "A ritual system," Professor Robertson Smith remarks, "must always remain materialistic, even if its materialism is disguised under the cloak of mysticism." And it is with the incarnated ideas, uninfluenced by