make a perhaps half-conscious distinction between their mythology
and their religion. As to the former, they are communicative; as
to the latter, they jealously guard their secret in sacred
mysteries. It is improbable that reflective "black fellows" have
been morally shocked by the flagrant contradictions between their
religious conceptions and their mythical stories of the divine
beings. But human thought could not come into explicit clearness
of consciousness without producing the sense of shock and surprise
at these contradictions between the Religion and the Myth of the
same god. Of this we proceed to give examples.

In Greece, as early as the sixth century B. C., we are all familiar
with Xenophanes' poem[1] complaining that the gods were credited
with the worst crimes of mortals--in fact, with abominations only
known in the orgies of Nero and Elagabalus. We hear Pindar
refusing to repeat the tale which told him the blessed were
cannibals.[2] In India we read the pious Brahmanic attempts to
expound decently the myths which made Indra the slayer of a
Brahman; the sinner, that is, of the unpardonable sin. In Egypt,
too, we study the priestly or philosophic systems by which the
clergy strove to strip the burden of absurdity and sacrilege from
their own deities. From all these efforts of civilised and pious
believers to explain away the stories about their own gods we may
infer one fact--the most important to the student of mythology--the
fact that myths were not evolved in times of clear civilised
thought. It is when Greece is just beginning to free her thought
from the bondage of too concrete language, when she is striving to
coin abstract terms, that her philosophers and poets first find the
myths of Greece a stumbling-block.