“I don’t see how the priests could have known the truth,” Ruth said, “if they meant to deceive the populace. Those who knew the truth would not wish to deceive.”
“You are right,” I answered; “they had not the whole truth, but in so far as they saw, they saw truly.”
Ruth seemed to doubt this historic account. I quietly proved to her and the others that it was true. I read them a passage from Plato’s “Republic,” in which he recommends telling the people a myth because belief in it would put them in the proper frame of mind.
I went on to explain how the democratic spirit began to destroy the religion of the initiated. The aristocracy of religion was as much resented as the aristocracy of government.
The result was that every one believed the popular, mythical religion; and that is what most of our churches have lived upon since then. All the superstitions of creeds, the absurd stories that are believed literally by some people even to-day, are the poetic symbols of prophets and teachers, accepted as narratives of fact.
Next came the scientific spirit, and said: “The world is more than six thousand years old; it was not created in a week; the whale could not have swallowed Jonah, and given him up again.” Now people cried out: “Religion is not true. We will believe nothing but science.”
When I spoke of the difference between mythical and true religion, I found the children already understood this, that they realized Moses’ true meaning when he spoke of the burning bush; that they knew Jesus, when he spoke of himself as the son of God, meant to express the divinity of man. I said the true religion spoke in poetry, and the popular made its figures of speech into gods.
“For instance,” I said, “from where comes the line, ‘The rosy fingers of the dawn’?”
“From Homer,” answered Marian, “from the Odyssey.”
“Well,” I went on, “a person reading that might say, ‘Just think, the dawn has fingers; then it must have a hand.’”