WHAT TO DO WITH THE LEGENDS
What we should do, then, is to pool our legends and make a delightful
stock of religious folk-lore on an honest basis for all mankind. With
our minds freed from pretence and falsehood we could enter into the
heritage of all the faiths. China would share her sages with Spain, and
Spain her saints with China. The Ulster man who now gives his son an
unmerciful thrashing if the boy is so tactless as to ask how the evening
and the morning could be the first day before the sun was created, or
to betray an innocent calf-love for the Virgin Mary, would buy him a
bookful of legends of the creation and of mothers of God from all parts
of the world, and be very glad to find his laddie as interested in such
things as in marbles or Police and Robbers. That would be better
than beating all good feeling towards religion out of the child, and
blackening his mind by teaching him that the worshippers of the holy
virgins, whether of the Parthenon or St Peter's, are fire-doomed
heathens and idolaters. All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to
the world by the hands of storytellers and image-makers.
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