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Essays and Lectures by Oscar Wilde
page 14 of 177 (07%)
reproduced]), 'I feel sure,' he says, 'that many of them died from
getting their heads broken, notwithstanding the assertions of the
Egyptian priests to the contrary.' There is also something
charmingly naive in the account he gives of the celebrated Greek
swimmer who dived a distance of eighty stadia to give his
countrymen warning of the Persian advance. 'If, however,' he says,
'I may offer an opinion on the subject, I would say that he came in
a boat.'

There is, of course, something a little trivial in some of the
instances I have quoted; but in a writer like Herodotus, who stands
on the borderland between faith and rationalism, one likes to note
even the most minute instances of the rise of the critical and
sceptical spirit of inquiry.

How really strange, at base, it was with him may, I think, be shown
by a reference to those passages where he applies rationalistic
tests to matters connected with religion. He nowhere, indeed,
grapples with the moral and scientific difficulties of the Greek
Bible; and where he rejects as incredible the marvellous
achievements of Hercules in Egypt, he does so on the express
grounds that he had not yet been received among the gods, and so
was still subject to the ordinary conditions of mortal life ([Greek
text which cannot be reproduced]).

Even within these limits, however, his religious conscience seems
to have been troubled at such daring rationalism, and the passage
(ii. 45) concludes with a pious hope that God will pardon him for
having gone so far, the great rationalistic passage being, of
course, that in which he rejects the mythical account of the
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