“They will tell you that the miraculous circumstances of Christ’s birth are but a parody on old heathen myths, that a woman with a Divine Child in her arms was worshiped by the Indus and the Nile, and that many an ancient hero claimed a divine paternity. They will go to the very root of revelation and tell you that Vishnu floated on primal seas even as God moved on the face of the waters; that while the Norse Ymir slept, a man and a woman grew out from under his left arm like Eve from sleeping Adam’s side. The fragmentary resemblances are countless.
“Our God be thanked that not the Israelite alone, but even those step-children of the Light had some sense of his coming footsteps! They had caught an echo of the promise, for it was made for all. It was moulded into the clay that made their bodies. It aspired in the spark that kindled their souls.
“I have seen the nest of a swallow all straightly built of parallel woven twigs, except in one corner. In that corner, in a shoal perspective, was an upright end of pale brown stick shaped like an antique altar. Two tiny twigs were laid on top as for a fire, and from them rose a point of bright yellow leaf for a flame. A pencil could not draw the shapes in better proportion, nor color them more perfectly.
“Above the leaf-flame was hung a cross like a letter X, which is a rising or a falling cross. This, floating in the air above the altar, seemed a veiled interpretation of the sacrifice. Larger, inclosing all, was an upright cross, the beam of which formed one side of a triangle, the figure of the Trinity.
“These figures were laid, one over the other, increasing in size from the altar outward, the victim announced, the mode of his sacrifice hinted, and his divinity proclaimed,—all the emblems of Christianity plainly and chronologically set. What breath of the great all-pervading harmony blew these symbols to the beak of a nesting bird!
“From the first records that we possess of human life, a divine legend or a divine expectation looms before the souls of men, vague as to time, sometimes confused in outline, but ever striking some harmonious chord with their own needs and aspirations, and with the visible world about them.
“See those southern mountain-tops half hidden in a fleet of clouds just sailing over! Even we who know those heights from infancy can scarce be certain what is rock and what is mist in all those outlines. A cliff runs up in shadow, and masses of frowning vapors catch and carry its profile almost to the zenith. There is a rounded mountain where the snow never lingered; and a pile of snowy cumuli has settled on its grayness, and sharpened itself to a fairy pinnacle to mock our ice-peaks, and sifted its white drifts into crevices downward, and set its alabaster buttresses to confuse our knowledge of the old familiar height. Yonder where the White Lady has stood during all the years of our lives, pure and stainless against the blue southwest, a dazzling whirl of sun-bleached mists has usurped her place, leaving visible only her pedestal wreathed about with olive-trees.
“But if you watch awhile the slowly moving veil, gathering with care each glimpse of an unchanging outline, you can build up again the solid mountain wall.
“So the heathen, yes! and the Jew also, saw the coming Christ. Anubis, Isis, Osiris, Buddha, Thor,—they had each some inch-long outline, some divine hand-breadth of truth running off into fantastic myth.
“Were they content with their gods, those puzzled but reverent souls? No; for they were ever seeking new ones, or adding some new feature to the old. Their Sphinx, combining in herself the forms of woman and lion, dog, serpent, and bird, seemed set there to ask, What form will the Divine One choose? Are these creatures all the children of one primal mother? Of what mysterious syllogism is the brute creation the mystical conclusion?