Note 120 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

But the power of intellectual habit and environment was still strikingly illustrated in the inability of all of the critics to shake off completely the old fallacy. Bauer explained the divine promise to Abraham as standing for the patriarch’s own prophetic anticipation, set up by a contemplation of the starry heavens. Another gave up the supernatural promise of the birth of the Baptist, but held to the dumbness of Zechariah. Krug similarly accepted the item of the childless marriage, and claimed to be applying the mythical principle in taking the Magi without the star, and calling them oriental merchants. Kaiser took the story of the fish with a coin in its mouth as fact, while complaining of other less absurd reductions of miracle to natural occurrences. The method of Paulus,120 the “Christian Evêmeros”—who loyally rejected all miracles, but got rid of them on the plan of explaining, e.g., that when Jesus was supposed to be walking on the water he was really walking on the bank—was still popular, a generation after Schleiermacher’s Reden. The mythical theory as a whole went on hesitating among definitions and genera—saga and legend, historical myth, mythical history, philosophical myth, poetic myth—and the differences of the mythological school over method arrested the acceptance of their fundamental principle.