Because while the schoolboy reads how
the Gods were like to men, only better, wiser, greater; how the Heroes
are the children of the Gods, and the slayers of the monsters which
devour the earth; how Athene taught men weaving, and Phoebus music, and
Vulcan the cunning of the stithy; how the Gods took pity on the noble-
hearted son of Danae, and lent him celestial arms and guided him over
desert and ocean to fulfil his vow--that boy is learning deep lessons of
metaphysic, more in accordance with the reine vernunft, the pure reason
whereby man perceives that which is moral, and spiritual, and eternal,
than he would from all disquisitions about being and becoming, about
actualities and potentialities, which ever tormented the weary brain of
man.
Let us not despise the gem because it has been broken to fragments,
obscured by silt and mud. Still less let us fancy that one least
fragment of it is not more precious than the most brilliant paste jewel
of our own compounding, though it be polished and faceted never so
completely. For what are all these myths but fragments of that great
metaphysic idea, which, I boldly say, I believe to be at once the
justifier and the harmoniser of all philosophic truth which man has ever
discovered, or will discover; which Philo saw partially, and yet
clearly; which the Hebrew sages perceived far more deeply, because more
humanly and practically; which Saint Paul the Platonist, and yet the
Apostle, raised to its highest power, when he declared that the
immutable and self-existent Being, for whom the Greek sages sought, and
did not altogether seek in vain, has gathered together all things both
in heaven and in earth in one inspiring and creating Logos, who is both
God and Man?
Be this as it may, we find that from the time of Philo, the deepest
thought of the heathen world began to flow in a theologic channel.
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