Dr. Schaff, and a multitude
of recent Christian travellers in Palestine, have put into the
realm of legend the story of Lot's wife transformed into a
pillar of salt; that the anthropologists, by showing how man has
risen everywhere from low and brutal beginnings, have destroyed
the whole theological theory of "the fall of man"? Our great
body of sacred literature is thereby only made more and more
valuable to us: more and more we see how long and patiently the
forces in the universe which make for righteousness have been
acting in and upon mankind through the only agencies fitted for
such work in the earliest ages of the world--through myth,
legend, parable, and poem.
CHAPTER XVIII.
FROM THE DEAD SEA LEGENDS TO COMPARATIVE MYTHOLOGY,
I. THE GROWTH OF EXPLANATORY TRANSFORMATION MYTHS.
A FEW years since, Maxime Du Camp, an eminent member of the French
Academy, travelling from the Red Sea to the Nile through the Desert
of Kosseir, came to a barren slope covered with boulders, rounded
and glossy.
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