so momentous a change in religious and moral thought and practice that it would be strange if it left no legendary record of itself. We may discern one in the story of Abraham’s sacrifice; to which we find a very striking and close parallel in the Laconian legend of Helen, whose father intended to sacrifice her to God in order to stay a plague:[27.1] {28} the eagle, the messenger of God, swooped down and snatched the knife from the sacrificer’s hand, and let it fall on a kid that was pasturing near. Again, we are all familiar with the story of Jephtha’s vow: the fact is not so well known that a story identical in nearly every detail was told of Idomeneus, the Cretan hero,[28.1] who vowed that if he returned home from the Trojan war he would sacrifice to God the first thing that he met on landing: his daughter was the first that met him--and Idomeneus “did with her according to his vow,” or intended to do so, and the people exiled him for it. Different from these, but belonging to the inner circle, so to speak, of sacred narrative, are one or two Gospel stories which are not peculiar to Palestine or to our sacred books. The miraculous star that guides sacred personages on a divine errand must be an Anatolian star-legend, for it is told of Æneas and his voyage to Italy.[28.2] And a critical appreciation of the {29} style of Hellenic folk-lore detects at once a marked Hellenic colour in the legends that gather around the birth and rearing of the Virgin in the apocryphal Gospel of St James. More important and suggestive of much more is the parallelism that we discover between the story of our Lord’s temptation and the temptation of Zarathustra in the Zend-Avesta: here also the evil god offers the holy prophet the kingdoms of the world if he will fall down and worship him.[29.1] Finally, it is not improbable that the strange legend preserved in various late Greek MSS., of the Virgin Mary’s descent into hell,[29.2] where she is shown the torments of the damned, is derived ultimately from the Babylonian myth of the descent of Ischtar, which in the Greek world transformed itself into the story of the descent of Aphrodite. This suggestion is in harmony with the evidence which will be {30} noticed below for the belief that the development of the worship and the divine character of the Virgin owed much, directly or indirectly, to the great Anatolian cult of the mother-goddess. As regards the legend just mentioned, we may suppose direct borrowing, or at least direct mental suggestion from an older mythology and faith. To the other examples which I have adduced--probably only a few among many that might be quoted--the theory of borrowing may be inappropriate.