But on no branch of historical knowledge have the recent philological researches thrown more light than on mythology--a science which the present age may be said to have created. While illustrious defenders of the Christian religion--a Count Stolberg[5] in Germany, and still more, an abbé de la Mennais[6] in France, treading in the footsteps of the ancient fathers, and of the abler modern apologists, like Grotius, Huet and others, have victoriously proved the existence of a primeval revelation, the diffusion and perpetuity of its doctrines among all the nations of the world, civilized and barbarous--the compatibility of a belief in the unity of the God-head with the crime of idolatry, ranked by the apostle, "among the works of the flesh,"--the local nature and object of the Mosaic law, destined by the Almighty for the special use of a people charged with maintaining, in its purity, that worship of Jehovah mostly abandoned or neglected by the nations, who "though they knew God, did not glorify him as God"--and favoured also with the promises of "the good things to come," intrusted with the prophetic records of the life and ministry of that Messiah, of whose future coming the Gentiles had only a vague and obscure anticipation:--while these illustrious defenders of religion, I say, were proving the agreement of all the Heathen nations in the great dogmas of the primitive revelation; another class of inquirers (and among these was Schlegel) laboured to shew the points of divergence in the different systems of Heathenism, studied the peculiar genius of each, and traced the influence which climate, circumstance, and national character have exerted over all. The object of the former was to point out the general threads of primeval truth in the fabric of Paganism--that of the latter to trace the later and fanciful intertexture of superstition. For in that fantastic web, which we call mythology, truth and fiction, poetry and history, physics and philosophy, are all curiously interwoven. Hence the arduous nature of these researches--hence the difficulties and perils which await the investigator at almost every step.
Of the second part of this work on India, which treats of the religious and philosophical systems of the early Asiatic nations, it is the less necessary here to speak, as the reader will find the subject amply discussed in the course of the following sheets. It may be proper, however, to observe that the different philosophic errors mentioned by Schlegel, as prevalent in the ancient Asiatic world, may all be resolved to two systems--Dualism and Pantheism--the two earliest heresies in the history of religion--the two gulfs, into which dark, but presumptuous, reason fell, when, rejecting the light of revelation, she attempted to explain those unfathomable mysteries--the origin of evil on the one hand, and the co-existence of the finite and the infinite on the other.