The doubt thrown upon the existence of Tell came from an influence that bears upon things of a graver import. They originated at the time when religion was dead, and when rationalism, with an appearance of erudition, was rife. Many critics formed theories of their own in regard to Homer and the ancient writers and heroes in general. Book after book was issued from the press filled with the most absurd theories. Every student who came from a university had the ambition to write a book. Each one thought himself a veritable Daniel come to judgment; nearly every historical character was a being of imagination. They did not stop with human characters, they laid hold upon the Word of God. Moses became a myth in their hands; and Job was a mere story in poetry, like the Arabian Nights; Ecclesiastes was the blating of an Epicurean philosopher no longer young. Good, however, came out of this evil. The best men were led to examine the basis on which the truth stands, and to study more profoundly than ever the “faith once delivered to the saints,” and the result was the overthrow of this school of specious reasoning and crude theories. The details of Tell’s story, at last, do not signify much; they form only the drapery of the figure, which stands to this day one of the few heroes who have been able so to forget themselves, and so to inspire other men with self-forgetfulness, as to obtain with them a nation’s freedom. And thus Tell lives, safely, in the people’s songs and in the faithful hearts of his countrymen. Ideals, the symbols of the truth which we conceive, of the beauty which we imagine, and of the good which we long for, have as great an influence in the world as _ideas_, if not even greater. High ideals and loyalty to them are virtues which are requisite to the existence and safety of a progressive society. We cannot afford to surrender the least of our high and pure ideals to the iconoclasm that would declare every grand historical character to be apocryphal; a spirit that revels in the breaking of images simply for the pleasure of breaking, even if chiselled by the hand of Praxiteles; a folly not content with robbing us of Tell and his apple, but would deprive us of Newton’s apple, too, and vainly talks of a cryptogram lurking in Shakespeare’s dramas, which points to his mythical existence. We have too few immortal names identified with their country’s glory. Let us not seek to inquire too minutely into their title to fame, to see if it is embarrassed by vague and contradictory traditions; but let us rather associate their names with the greatness, the virtue, the durability of their race, and invoke blessings on them down “to the last syllable of recorded time.”