first admit that to its followers it was, at one time, earnestly true. Let
us consider it very certain that men did believe in Paganism; men with open
eyes, sound senses, men made altogether like ourselves; that we, had we
been there, should have believed in it. Ask now, What Paganism could have
been?

Another theory, somewhat more respectable, attributes such things to
Allegory. It was a play of poetic minds, say these theorists; a shadowing
forth, in allegorical fable, in personification and visual form, of what
such poetic minds had known and felt of this Universe. Which agrees, add
they, with a primary law of human nature, still everywhere observably at
work, though in less important things, That what a man feels intensely, he
struggles to speak out of him, to see represented before him in visual
shape, and as if with a kind of life and historical reality in it. Now
doubtless there is such a law, and it is one of the deepest in human
nature; neither need we doubt that it did operate fundamentally in this
business. The hypothesis which ascribes Paganism wholly or mostly to this
agency, I call a little more respectable; but I cannot yet call it the true
hypothesis. Think, would _we_ believe, and take with us as our
life-guidance, an allegory, a poetic sport? Not sport but earnest is what
we should require. It is a most earnest thing to be alive in this world;
to die is not sport for a man. Man's life never was a sport to him; it was
a stern reality, altogether a serious matter to be alive!

I find, therefore, that though these Allegory theorists are on the way
towards truth in this matter, they have not reached it either. Pagan
Religion is indeed an Allegory, a Symbol of what men felt and knew about
the Universe; and all Religions are symbols of that, altering always as
that alters: but it seems to me a radical perversion, and even inversion,
of the business, to put that forward as the origin and moving cause, when