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The Jesus-story, it will now be seen, has a great number of correspondences with the stories of former Sungods and with the actual career of the Sun through the heavens so many indeed that they cannot well be attributed to mere coincidence or even to the blasphemous wiles of the Devil! Let us enumerate some of these. Thomas, who doubted the truth of the Resurrection!

Again, when the study of religious origins first began in modern times to be seriously taken up say in the earlier part of last century there was a great boom in Sungods. Apollo was a sungod, of course; Hercules was a sungod; Samson was a sungod; Indra and Krishna, and even Christ, the same. A little later the PHALLIC explanation of everything came into fashion.

The chapters mentioned were largely occupied with Sungods and astronomical phenomena, but now we have to consider an earlier period when there were no definite forms of gods, and when none but the vaguest astronomical knowledge existed.

For year he assigned the date which we now adopt, and for day and month he adopted the 25th December a date which had been in popular use since about 350 B.C., and the very date, within a day or two, of the supposed birth of the previous Sungods. From that fact alone we may fairly conclude that by the year 530 or earlier the existing Nature-worships had become largely fused into Christianity.

But when you reflect how rapidly legends grow up even in these days of exact Science and an omniscient Press; how the figure of Shakespeare, dead only 300 years, is almost completely lost in the mist of Time, and even the authenticity of his works has become a subject of controversy; when you find that William Tell, supposed to have lived some 300 years again before Shakespeare, and whose deeds in minutest detail have been recited and honored all over Europe, is almost certainly a pure invention, and never existed; when you remember as mentioned earlier in this book that it was more than five hundred years after the supposed birth of Jesus before any serious effort was made to establish the date of that birth and that then a purely mythical date was chosen: the 25th December, the day of the SUN'S new birth after the winter solstice, and the time of the supposed birth of Apollo, Bacchus, and the other Sungods; when, moreover, you think for a moment what the state of historical criticism must have been, and the general standard of credibility, 1,900 years ago, in a country like Syria, and among an ignorant population, where any story circulating from lip to lip was assured of credence if sufficiently marvelous or imaginative; why, then the legendary theory does not seem so improbable.