And this figures as a refutation. For our traditionalist, comparative mythology does not and cannot exist; for him there can be no fundamental connection between any two nominal myths unless they are absolutely identical in all their details; and the goat-footed Pan and the goat-footed Satan (certainly descended from the Goat-God Azazel) are merely "very different beings," though Satan for the later Jews and Jesuists actually corresponded to Pan (who is not a mere satyr for the Greeks) not only in being the spirit of concupiscence [44] but in being "the God of this world," as the Gospel myth in effect shows him to be. And this exhibition of ignorance of every principle of mythology passes for "scholarship," and will be duly so certificated by Sir William Robertson Nicoll, who undertakes to preside in that department, as in politics, with about equal qualifications.
By way of constructive solution of the problem we have from the apologist this:--
If a conjecture may be hazarded here, we should be inclined to say that the Christian narrative largely presents, in picturesque and symbolic form, the subjective experiences and doubts of Jesus--whether these were of internal origin merely, or were suggested externally by some malignant spiritual being--as to His capacities and power for the great work which He had undertaken.
The thoroughly orthodox, it would appear, must still be catered for, albeit only by the concession of the possibility of "some" malignant spiritual being, which seems a gratuitous slight to the canonical Satan, whose moral dignity had immediately before been acclaimed. But, after expressly insisting on the elements of "temptation" and "ambition" in the story, with the apparent implication that the young Teacher may have had a passing ambition to become a world conqueror, our exegete, in conclusion, collapses to the position of the German exegetes who, the other day, were still debating on the spiritual interpretation of what they could not perceive to be a pure myth of art.
At this stage of enlightenment we hear allusions to "psychology," though I have not yet met with any explicit pretence that the traditionalist scholars know anything about psychology that is not known to the rest of us. In any case, the suggestion may be hazarded that the first researches they make into psychology might usefully be directed to their own, which is a distressing illustration of the survival of the intellectual methods of the ancient apologists for the Vedas and for the mythology of the Greeks.