The immense longevity of the early generations of mankind was eminently favourable to the preservation of pristine traditions. Each individual, instead of being as now a witness of, or an agent in, one or two transmissions from father to son, would observe or share in ten times as many. According to the Hebrew Chronology, Lamech the father of Noah was of mature age before Adam died: and Abraham was of mature age before Noah died. Original or early witnesses, remaining so long as standards of appeal, would evidently check the rapidity of the darkening and destroying process.

Let us suppose that man now lived but twenty years, instead of fourscore. Would not this greatly quicken the waste of ancient traditions? And is not the converse also true?

~_Sufficiently proved from Holy Scripture._~

Custom has made it with us second nature to take for granted a broad line of demarcation between those who live within the pale of Revelation, and the residue of mankind. But Holy Scripture does not appear to recognise such a severance in any manner, until we come to the revelation of the Mosaic law, which was like the erection of a temporary shelter for truths that had ranged at large over the plain, and that were apparently in danger of being totally absorbed in the mass of human inventions. But before this vineyard was planted, and likewise outside its fence, there were remains, smaller or greater, of the knowledge of God; and there was a recognised relation between Jehovah and mankind, which has been the subject of record from time to time, and the ground of acts involving the admonition, or pardon, or correction, or destruction, of individuals or communities.

The latest of these indications, such as the visit of the Wise Men from the East, are not the most remarkable: because first the captivity in Babylon, and subsequently the dissemination of Jewish groups through so many parts of the world, could not but lead to direct communications of divine knowledge, at least, in some small degree. From such causes, there would be many a Cornelius before him who became the first-fruits of the Gentiles. Yet even the interest, which probably led to such communications from the Jew, must have had its own root in relics of prior tradition, which attested the common concern of mankind in Him that was to come. But in earlier times, and when the Jewish nation was more concentrated, and was certainly obscure, the vestiges of extra-patriarchal and extra-judaical relations between God and man are undeniable. They have been traced with clearness and ability in a popular treatise by the hand of Bishop Horsley[4].

[4] Horsley’s Dissertation on the Prophecies of the Messiah dispersed among the heathen. See also Mr. Harvey’s Observations on the Gnostic System, pp. iii and seqq., prefixed to his S. Irenæus, Cambridge, 1857. Williams’s Primitive Tradition, p. 9.

Let us take, for instance, that case of extreme wickedness, which most severely tries the general proposition. The punishment of Sodom and Gomorrah for their sins was preceded by a declaration from the Most High, importing a direct relation with those guilty cities[5]; and two angels, who had visited Abraham on the plains of Mamre, ‘came to Sodom at even.’ Ruth the Moabitess was an ancestress, through king David, of our Lord. Rahab in Jericho, ‘by faith,’ as the Apostle assures us, entertained the spies of the Israelites. Job, living in a country where the worship of the sun was practised, had, as had his friends, the knowledge of the true God. Melchizedek, the priest of On, whose daughter Joseph married, and Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses, are other conspicuous instances. Later in time, Nineveh, the great Assyrian capital, received the message of the prophet Jonah, and repented at his preaching. Here the teaching organ was supplied from among the Jews: but Balaam exhibits to us the gift of inspiration beyond their bounds. Once more; many centuries after the Homeric manners had disappeared, and during the captivity, we find not only a knowledge of God, but dreams and signs vouchsafed to Assyrian kings, and interpreted for them by the prophet Daniel. We have, in short, mingling with the whole course of the Old Testament, a stream of evidence which shows the partial remnants of the knowledge of God, apart from that main current of it which is particularly traced for us in the patriarchal and Mosaic histories. Again, many centuries after Homer, when all traces of primitive manners had long vanished, still in the Prometheus of Æschylus, and in the Pollio of Virgil, we have signs, though I grant they are faint ones, that the celestial rays had not even then ‘faded into the light of common day’ for the heathen world. It would really be strange, and that in a high degree, if a record like that of Homer, with so many resemblances to the earliest manners in other points, had no link to connect it with them in their most vital part.

[5] See Genesis xviii. 1, 20. xx. 1. Heb. xi. 31.

~_The question one of history._~

The general proposition, that we may expect to find the relics of Scriptural traditions in the heroic age of Greece, though it leads, if proved, to important practical results, is independent even of a belief in those traditions, as they stand in the scheme of revealed truth. They must be admitted to have been facts on earth, even by those who would deny them to be facts of heavenly origin, in the shape in which Christendom receives them: and the question immediately before us is one of pure historical probability. The descent of mankind from a single pair, the lapse of that pair from original righteousness, are apart from and ulterior to it. We have traced the Greek nation to a source, and along a path of migration, which must in all likelihood have placed its ancestry, at some point or points, in close local relations with the scenes of the earliest Mosaic records: the retentiveness of that people equalled its receptiveness, and its close and fond association with the past made it prone indeed to incorporate novel matter into its religion, but prone also to keep it there after its incorporation.

If such traditions existed, and if the laws which guide historical inquiry require or lead us to suppose that the forefathers of the Greeks must have lived within their circle, then the burden of proof must lie not so properly with those who assert that the traces of them are to be found in the earliest, that is, the Homeric, form of the Greek mythology, as with those who deny it. What became of those old traditions? They must have decayed and disappeared, not by a sudden process, but by a gradual accumulation of the corrupt accretions, in which at length they were so completely interred as to be invisible and inaccessible. Some period therefore there must have been, at which they would remain clearly perceptible, though in conjunction with much corrupt matter. Such a period might be made the subject of record, and if such there were, we might naturally expect to find it in the oldest known work of the ancient literature.

If the poems of Homer do, however, contain a picture, even though a defaced picture, of the primeval religious traditions, it is obvious that they afford a most valuable collateral support to the credit of the Holy Scripture, considered as a document of history. Still we must not allow the desire of gaining this advantage to bias the mind in an inquiry, which can only be of value if it is conducted according to the strictest rules of rational criticism.

~_Invention combined with tradition._~

We may then, in accordance with those rules, be prepared to expect that the Hellenic religion will prove to have been in part constructed from traditional knowledge. The question arises next, Of what other materials in addition was it composed? The answer can be but one; Such materials would be supplied by invention. But invention cannot absolutely create; it can only work upon what it finds already provided to its hand. The provision made in this instance was simply that with which the experience of man supplied him. It was mediate or immediate: mediate, where the Greek received matter from abroad, and wrought upon it: immediate, where he conceived it for himself. That experience lay in two spheres--the sphere of external nature, and the sphere of life. Each of these would afford for the purpose the elements of Power, Grandeur, Pleasure, Beauty, Utility; and such would be the elements suited to the work of constructing or developing a system that was to present objects for his worship. We may therefore reasonably expect to find in the religion features referable to these two departments for their origin;--first, the powerful forces and attractive forms of outward nature; secondly, the faculties and propensities of man, and those relations to his fellow-men, amidst which his lot is cast, and his character formed.

If this be so, then, in the result thus compounded out of tradition purporting to be revealed, and out of invention strictly human, we ought to recognise, so long as both classes of ingredients are in effective coexistence, not strictly a false theology, but a true theology falsified: a true religion, into which falsehood has entered, and in which it is gradually overlaying and absorbing the original truth, until, when the process has at length reached a certain point, it is wholly hidden and borne down by countervailing forces, so that the system has for practical purposes become a false one, and both may and should be so termed and treated.