[291-3] Joseph de Maistre, Eclaircissement sur les Sacrifices; Trench, Hulsean Lectures, p. 180. The famed Abbé Lammenaais and Professor Sepp, of Munich, with these two writers, may be taken as the chief exponents of a school of mythologists, all of whom start from the theories first laid down by Count de Maistre in his Soirées de St. Petersbourg. To them the strongest proof of Christianity lies in the traditions and observances of heathendom. For these show the wants of the religious sense, and Christianity, they maintain, purifies and satisfies them all. The rites, symbols, and legends of every natural religion, they say, are true and not false; all that is required is to assign them their proper places and their real meaning. Therefore the strange resemblances in heathen myths to what is revealed in the Scriptures, as well as the ethical anticipations which have been found in ancient philosophies, all, so far from proving that Christianity is a natural product of the human mind, in fact, are confirmations of it, unconscious prophecies, and presentiments of the truth.
[292-1] Alfred Maury, La Magie et l’Astrologie dans l’Antiquité et au Moyen Age, p. 8: Paris, 1860.
[292-2] Waitz, Anthropologie, i. pp. 325, 465.
[293-1] So says Dr. Waitz, ibid., p. 465.
[294-1] Schoolcraft, Algic Researches, i. p. 143.
[294-2] L’Homme Américain, ii. p. 319.
[295-1] Brasseur, Hist. du Mexique, liv. iii. chaps. 1 and 2.
[295-2] Sahagun, Hist. de la Nueva España, lib. x. cap. 29.
[296-1] Novalis, Schriften, i. p. 244: Berlin, 1837.
[296-2] Ibid., p. 267.