rites and creeds to their earliest shape is manifestly harder than that of tracing material inventions, or laws between man and man, to their first germs, for we are here trenching on some of the deepest questions which the human mind is capable of contemplating--nothing less, indeed, than the nature of conscience and the dealings of God Himself with the souls of His creatures. We must therefore tread cautiously, be content to leave a great deal uncertain, and, making up our minds only on such points as appear to be decided by revelation, accept on others the results of present researches as still imperfect, and liable to be modified as further light on the difficult problems in consideration is obtained. [Sidenote: Explanation of mythology through the study of language.] The study of language has perhaps done more than anything else to clear away the puzzles which mythologies formerly presented to students. It has helped in two ways: first, by tracing the names of objects of worship to their root-forms, and thus showing their meaning and revealing the thought which lay at the root of the worship; secondly, by proving the identity between the gods of different nations, whose names, apparently different, have been resolved into the same root-word, or to a root of the same meaning, when the alchemy of philological research was applied to them. The discovery of a closer relationship than had been formerly suspected between the mythologies of various nations is a very important one, as it enables us to trace the growth of the stories told of gods and heroes, from the mature form in which we first become acquainted with them in the religious systems of the Greeks, Romans, and Scandinavians, to the primitive shape in which the same creeds were held by the more metaphysical and less imaginative Eastern peoples among whom they originally sprang up. In some respects this task of tracing back the poetical myths of Greek and Northern poets to the simpler, if grander, beliefs of the ancient Egyptians or Chaldæans or Hindus is not unlike our search in a perfected language for its earliest roots. We lose shapeliness and beauty as we come back, but we find the form that explains the birth of the thought, and lets us see how it grew in the minds of men. One chief result arrived at by this comparison of creeds, and by unravelling the meaning of the names of ancient gods and heroes, is the discovery that a worship of different aspects and forces of nature lies at the bottom of nearly all mythologies, and that the cause of the resemblance between the stories told of the gods and heroes (a resemblance which strikes us as soon as we read two or three of them together) is that they are in reality only slightly different ways of describing natural appearances according to the effect produced on different minds, or to the variations of climate and season of the year. Having once got the key of the enigma in our hands, we soon become