But we may go still farther. The attempt to explain the origin and course of religion by the study of the various heathen mythologies, and idolatries, and superstitions, is as absurd as to attempt to determine the origin and course of the Christian religion by the study of the thousand and one sects that have broken off from the church, and set up to be churches themselves. They can teach us nothing except the gradual deterioration of religious thought, and the development and growth of superstition or irreligion among those separated from the central religious life of the race. In the ancient Indian, Egyptian, and Greek mythologies, on which the author dwells with so much emphasis, we trace no gradual purification of the religious idea, but its continual corruption and debasement. As the sects all presuppose the Christian church, and could neither exist nor be intelligible without her, so those various heathen mythologies presuppose the patriarchal religion, are unintelligible without it, and could not have originated or exist without it. The professor having studied these mythologies in the darkness of no-religion, understands nothing of them, and finds no sense in them--as little sense as a man ignorant of Catholicity would find in the creeds, confessions, and religious observances of the several Protestant sects; but if he had studied them in the light of the patriarchal religion, which they mutilate, corrupt, or travesty, he might have understood them, and have traced with a steady hand their origin and course, and their relation to the intellectual development of the race.