As critics we are now in a position to take note of the mental aberrations of the mythological period; we can understand that when the ancient peoples attributed a divine descent to their kings and heroes, it was the highest praise that one man could give to another; we know that the mythology as taught in the schools, was no more the religion of the Greeks and Romans than rust is iron. Yet it is this homage which has perhaps obscured our minds as we imagine absolutely human intercourse taking place between mortals and immortals. The action of metaphor overstepped the boundary of the fabulous ages; it invaded, unknown to us, the domain of the modern thinker, and even our religion was not sheltered from its attacks; we now use in our religious phraseology the words of _father_ and _son_, without having first despoiled them of their material meaning; and we hardly realise that in this different sphere these words are a daring metaphor, upon which, of our own initiative, we could not have ventured. A vague idea that God is separated from us by space dominates us, so that the belief that there can be no barrier between the divine and human is often confounded with pantheism; yet without pantheism of this kind, which differs _in toto_ from the dogmatic pantheism, Christianity would not have made its appearance in the world. We invoke neither Jupiter nor Jehovah; God is for us the God whose name is found in all modern languages; but it is God around us, beyond us; in speaking of Him our thoughts follow Him to Heaven. When a man takes God to witness of his innocence, he involuntarily lifts his hand to Heaven; in a time of disastrous drought, when the earth refuses its nourishment to man and beast, pious souls are invited to pray to God for the blessing of rain. Whilst the work of science has been specially directed to causes, religion is content, as in the past, to attribute each act to an agent; the influence of ancient ideas on our present thought is still in force, and our mind has to live as the oyster, under a cover which it has made for itself. But we must submit to evidence, and acknowledge that if we do not yet escape from the power of mythology, it is that we meet its language everywhere, even in our sacred writings. Language has moulded our thoughts; when they tend towards God, we make a representation of Him as a person, we are not able to avoid such representations; we know that the sun does not rise each morning, but we cannot do otherwise than see it rise; we know that the sky is not blue, but to us it wears no other appearance.