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There is, to begin with, no trace of New Testament doctrine or history. The Masai tradition stops short with the Divine law-giving. It is, moreover, quite certain that no foreign missionaries have at any time carried their propaganda into the Masai country.

Christian influence. There is no fifth alternative. For the first alternative, the Hebrew origin of the Masai legends, there is not a shadow of evidence; nor is there any for the Babylonian origin of those legends-that is, the second alternative. The third alternative, a separate revelation to the Masai nation, is completely irrelevant, either for the orthodox, who believe in revelation only as regards the Hebrews; or for the "higher critics," who do not believe in revelation at all, whether to the Hebrews or to any other nation.

That the Masai should at any time have come into contact with Babylonian culture is also quite out of the question. The assumption that the Masai at any period migrated into Africa from Egypt seems quite hypothetical. We may, at all events, thinks Captain Merker, be quite certain that the immigration did not take place subsequently to the fourth millennium B.C. Had the Masai passed through Egypt later than that date we might look to find some written record in Egypt itself. Of the traditions which the Masai possess we find no trace among Egyptian beliefs, so that there is no likelihood whatever of their having been brought thence. Even if we admit that the Masai came south, but before the fourth millennium B.C., we must recollect that at this early period the Babylonians were still plunged in Shamanistic superstitions.

A full consideration of the authentic story of Masai legends and myths, doctrine and dogma, forces us to lay down the following alternatives:

1. Either the Masai have received their legends at the hands of the Hebrews; or

2. The Masai have received them from the Babylonians; or

3. They have invented them-that is, they have been revealed to them independently; or

4. Both the Babylonians, Hebrews, and the Masal, coming, as they all did, from Arabia, had those legends in common before the Chaldeans went, from Arabia, north-eastward to Babylonia; the Hebrews, northward to Palestine; and the Masai, southward to what is now German East Africa.

Remains the fourth alternative, or the common origin of the Hebrew, Babylonian and Masai legends in the legends of Arabia.

There is little doubt that this, the fourth alternative, is the right one. Arabia, at all times the "store-chamber of nations," was never able to feed her untold thousands of hardy, beautiful, gifted people. Accordingly, they emi grated in all directions, as they did in the times of Mahomet and at other times. Thousands of years before Christ a stock of religious and other legends had grown up amongst them about the great riddles of the world. This they carried into their new countries; and thus the Babylonians, the Hebrews, the Masai, and very probably many another now unknown tribe from Arabia, whether in Persia, Afghanistan, Beluchistan or India, preserved, and still preserves, the legends about Creation, the Deluge, the Decalogue, etc., in their aboriginal form. It is just as possible, with purely philological arguments, to deduce the Masai legends from Hebrew stories as it is to deduce Hebrew legends from Babylonian myths. Or. to put it in a different fashion, the same philological arguments that have served to declare the Hebrew legends as mere copies of Babylonian myths, may now be employed in proving that all the Hebrew legends are of Masai origin, or vice

versâ. This absolute inability of the philological method of "Higher Criticisc" to decide definitely which is the parent and which the child, at once condemns it. Already in the question as to where was the original seat of the "Aryans," philologians have, in the last eighty years, given solutions locating that seat from the Pamir, through South Russia, to Sweden. Such Cooktours are not permissible in Science. If philological arguments are sufficient to persuade one set of scholars that the original home of the Aryans was in Central Asia, while another set of philologians is firmly convinced that it was in Scandinavia; common sense will tell any one who cares to listen to it that philology is unable to settle that question at all. It is even so with the original home of the legends common to the Hebrews, Babylonians and Masai negroes. If it should be found out that the Cossæans, Elamites, Scythians, or any other Central Asiatic tribe had legends similar to those of the Hebrews, then philologians will drop the "Babylonian" theory with contempt, and deduce all the Old Testament from Cossæan, Elamite or Scythian origins.

This may be very erudite, it is at the same time most preposterous. The possession of certain legends does not prove much. A multitude of nations may have had legends similar to those of the Hebrews, or to those of the New Testament. What no nation other than the Hebrews ever had were Moses, David, the Prophets, Jesus. These personalities, in whom the greatest forces of history became focussed and intensified; these personalities, that really made Hebrew history, if on the basis of national tendencies and national opportunities; these personalities are the distinctive feature of Hebrew history. They stand to the persons of Babylonian history, or Masai history, as does Shakespeare's Hamlet to the Hamlet in the dry chronicle of the Dane Saxo

Grammaticus. If Lord Bacon had written a thousand lines in Shakespeare's Hamlet, he would not have written Hamlet. What makes Shakespeare's Hamlet is the immortal and inexhaustible typical personality of Hamlet himself, which must necessarily be the product of one vast poetic imagination, and is by no means the arithmetical sum of this sentence or that in the piece called Hamlet. Even so the personality of Moses, David, the Prophets, or Jesus, is not an arithmetical sum of a number of sayings; but the integration of forces, national and hypernational. One may prove that this saying of Jesus is Buddhistic, and the other is taken from the Zendavesta. What can never be deduced is the transcendental personality of Jesus. The marble slabs of the Parthenon came from the Pentelicus or other mounts; the Parthenon came from the Athenians of the Fifth Century B.C. Says Poet to Dives: "The land is yours; the landscape is mine."

It is evident that philological reasoning which brings us to results which are so little permanent, results which are absolutely overturned by the first chance discovery, must have something fundamentally wrong in it. This fundamental and initial vice, quod tractu temporis convalescere nequit, which can be cured neither by the moderation and soberness of Hommel, who together with a few other historians has not yet given in to the claims of the "higher critics," nor by a still greater refinement of philological methods; this initial fault has vitiated and will vitiate all modern hyper-criticism of ancient records. Nor is there any particular difficulty in finding out the true nature of this fault. It is this: The history of the ancient nations must be constructed not on the basis of the philological study of their records, but mainly on the basis of considerations of geography, or, as the present writer

has ventured to call it, of geo-politics. What made the few tribes, "Semitic" or other, in Palestine, Syria and Phoenicia, so important a factor in history was neither their language nor their "race." The Hebrews and the Phoenicians have indeed played in history a rôle of the first magnitude. So have, even in a greater measure, the Hellenes. All the three were-and this is the capital point-border-nations proper. They lived on the great line of friction between the powerful and civilized inland empires of Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, the Hittites, the Phrygians, the Lydians, etc. All these inland empires necessarily, and as a matter of history, gravitated towards the "Great Sea," or the Mediterranean; all the peoples on the "line" between the Mediterranean and the territories of the conflicting Empires were then necessarily exposed to the maximum of friction, danger and deeply-agitated activity. Those nations were called the Hellenes, the Phoenicians, the Hebrews, the Edomites, etc. Being in imminent danger of absorption at the hands of the Empires, those nations could not but see, and did see, that they could protect themselves with success only by having recourse either to the immense leverage of sea-power, which the Empires did not possess; or by energizing themselves both intellectually and politically to a degree much more intense than the Empires had ever done. Accordingly some of them were forced to lay extraordinary premiums on higher intellect and spiritual growth, by means of which they resisted the more massive onslaught of the intellectually inferior Empires. What the sea was to the Hellenes and the Phoenicians, the desert was to the Hebrews: both sets of border-nations were aided by Nature in their Titanic struggle against fearful odds. What Monotheism was to the Hebrews, greater political, artistic and philosophic achievements were to

the Hellenes and the Phoenicians. The real leaven of ancient History is represented, not by the huge Empires of Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, etc.; but by the small border-nations called the Hebrews, Phoenicians, and Hellenes. These small, but ever-memorable, people did, by higher intellect, on the western coast of Asia, what in our times the Japanese, another border-nation, have done on the eastern shores of Asia, thanks to a deliberate Europeanization of their intellect. Nearly suffocated by two huge Empires, Russia and China, and not less jeopardized by several more European great Powers, the Japanese have, by conscious selfeducation and Europeanization, succeeded in securing, at any rate, their existence as a great Power, and perhaps more. Whoever the Greeks originally may have been, whether "Celtic," or "Aryan," "Pelasgic," or "Hittite," they were unable to do anything remarkable before they arrived at an historical locus, where geo-political circumstances compelled them to mature indefinitely their mental and physical endowment. To search laboriously into the problem of the "race" of the Hellenes is infinitely less important than to point out and to investigate the working of those geo-political circumstances in the second millennium B.C. Higher Criticism stands therefore condemned from the outset. It is based on purely philological considerations in a matter that is almost exclusively founded on considerations geo-political. Several more "Masai"-peoples may yet be discovered, with several more striking similarities to the myths, legends, dogmas of the Hebrews. But what can never be discovered are other cases of the peculiar geo-political circumstances of the second millennium B.C. in Western Asia. Nor can it be discovered that a series of leading Personalities, such as the border-nations in Western Asia, and they alone, then needed, were

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III.

Mrs. Macnay to Miss Bayley. Mrs. Macnay presents her compliments to Miss Bayley and hastens to set her doubts at rest. The rooms which would be at Miss Bayley's disposal have an aspect unquestionably south, the cook understands vegetables

When George's affairs are settled I shall have, Mr. Graham thinks, about £80 a year; and Messrs. Kershaw are to give me £75 for finishing George's little history book, and the column I contribute to the Planet brings in a guinea a week. I may also get a little more work. Anyway by the time Tom's school is paid for I shall not have much left. I am therefore going thoroughly, the drainage is good, and

to take Mr. Graham's advice, much as I dislike it, and advertise for a paying guest to take the two unoccupied rooms. Mrs. Vincent and I (she comes in a good deal and is very bright) had some fun last night drawing up advertisements; but in the end I sent to the Morning Post something quite staid and commonplace.

II.

Miss Bayley to A. M.

Miss Bayley would be glad to have further particulars as to A. M.'s advertisement for a paying guest in the Morning Post. Miss Bayley is looking out for a congenial home, and would be prepared to pay what is asked, but certain conditions are imperative.

although Mrs. Macnay does not herself attend the church the house is free from all taint of dissent.

IV.

Miss Bayley to Mrs. Macnay.

Miss Bayley thanks Mrs. Macnay for her letter, and is proposing to come on Monday to see the house, provided the following eight questions can be satisfactorily answered:

(1) Are there any children? (2) Does any one practise the pianoforte? (3) Are chickens kept by any near neighbor? (4) Is there a good young doctor available? (5) Is the Vicar high or low? (6) Could a pony-trap be obtained easily? (7) Do you object to a dog, a very quiet gentle Pomeranian?

(8) Is there any intellectual activity in the vicinity-a Dante Society for example?

V.

Mrs. Macnay to Miss Bayley.

Mrs. Macnay presents her compliments to Miss Bayley, and begs to reply to her questions in order.

1. One little girl, aged 7, is the only child, except in the holidays, when a boy aged 13 will return.

2. There is no piano.

3. And no chickens.

4. The doctor is 43.

5. Low Church.

6. Several pony-traps. 7. Do not mind dog.

8. No Dante Society. A mothers' meeting every first Monday in the month.

Mrs. Macnay will be pleased to show Miss Bayley the house on Monday.

VI.

Mrs. Macnay to her Sister-in-law. (Extract.)

The only reply that agreed to the terms was from a Miss Bayley, but her questions were so fussy that I answered her in a way which Mrs. Vincent and I felt sure would end the matter. We decided she could not go on with it, but the next post only brought a longer list of questions, eight in all, tabulated like an examination paper. So we have answered these this evening, also like an examination paper, and now feel really free of the inquisition and ready to try again.

VII.

Miss Bayley to a Friend.
(Extract.)

I went down to see the house on Monday and liked it extremely. Mrs. Macnay seems to be the widow of a literary man, and will, I think, do all I want. Her terms are absurdly low, and the neighborhood seems very

charming. I consider myself most fortunate.

VIII.

Mrs. Macnay to her Sister-in-law. (Extract.)

In spite of my letters Miss Bayley came as arranged, with the harmless dog, and the first thing that happened was that it bit the knife-and-boot boy in the leg. Miss Bayley was very sorry, but explained that it was the green baize apron that did it-Prinny (that is the dog's name) once having been ill-treated by a furniture man. She stayed an hour and looked at everything, and I must say that I dislike her immensely, but her ready acquiescence in the matter of terms makes it almost impossible not to take her. I wish now that I had asked more, as Mrs. Vincent wanted me to. One is always so wise afterwards. It is agreed that she comes next month.

IX.

Miss Bayley to Mrs. Macnay.

Dear Mrs. Macnay,-I have decided to share your house on the terms we have arranged, but I must ask you first to make two or three slight changes. I was conscious on the landing by my room of a discoloration in the wall which could not, I think, be due to any. thing but damp. I have such a horror of sciatica that I feel compelled to make a point of having some damp course applied before I take up my residence with you. Another matter is the knifeand-boot boy who so unfortunately placed himself in Prinny's way. I am conscious that I am asking a great and perhaps unreasonable favor, but I do so trust you may see your way to getting another boy in the place of this one, or I am convinced that Prinny may suffer. If convenient to you I shall move in on Monday, the 2nd of next month. Yours truly, Adelaide Bayley.

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