fice, "Christ shedding his blood for the redemption of mankind"; and we wonder at the ancient Mexicans, who merely carried the same idea into practice.

We teach our children all sorts of distorted ideas about nature, which would be childish if they were not criminal; we pervert their natural intuitions of justice and humanity by absurd doctrines of mystical retribution, unnatural pardon and cancellation of sin; the most savage notions of a great spirit are perpetuated in the doctrine of a special providence whose purposes are past judgment. Then we classify the idolatrous and blood-thirsty Hebrews and ourselves as religious; we extend the courtesy of the same classification, with certain reservations, to the ancient Mexicans, and to some of the Asiatics and the Egyptians; but all the other ancestor-worshippers, to whom we owe almost every religious notion which we possess, we relegate to the baser level of superstition.

With all our railroads, steamships, and telegraphs, our schools and universities, our halls of justice and legislation, -to say nothing of our priests and churches, we do not possess the average morality of the Dyaks or the humanity of the Veddahs. With all our boasted intelligence, language, and religion, we are unable to bring the individual up to as high a level of chastity, of honesty, and of general virtue, as that occupied by these pitiable tribes of primitive men and women. The reason is, that we are unwilling to believe that there can be any real progress which does not rest upon morality, any justice which does not point to the divine unity of life, any humanity or religion which does not rise above the conception of a personal God.

We are puzzled to define the term civilization, because we find in the midst of our vaunted progress the lowest orders of superstition, the most primitive conceptions of life and duty; and we are thus unable to distinguish that religion which should be our most glorious achievement from the childish beliefs of savages. Until we have so developed our language as to place beyond the pale of possibility a re

turn to these barbarisms of thought and feeling, are we not in danger of handing down the vast structures of our civilization as mere monuments of failure to the races to come?

Thus we see that the darkness in which the primitive man groped yields nothing to modern research excepting the picture of his feeble generalizations, his first efforts to understand himself and nature, which are given in his rude virtues and his ruder superstitions.

Upon the supposition that the religion of a people is the portrayal of their most general conceptions can be built up a complete theory of Knowledge; but it is important to remember that language is the mind of society, and that in relatively advanced nations there can be found what might be called a high-water mark of induction, a highest logical achievement, to which the tides of humanity make but a distant approach. Until the researches of Sir William Jones, in the year 1783, and of those who followed him in the study of Sanskrit, the religious thought of ancient India was a blank to the modern world. Through the insensible growth of language the venerable philosophy, the best thought and feeling, of an ancient people has been safely conveyed over the boundaries of race and language into the very heart of our era. The translations of Sanskrit seemed like a flood of new light to Christendom, but it was only the uncovering of an old mine which humanity had worked out ages before, and whose glittering gems have been worn ever since, descending as heirlooms through long generations. A great truth, a refined sentiment, can be expressed in any civilized tongue; languages may be forgotten and rediscovered; but these facts of existence live on through the changes of race and speech, each age reproducing them with unfailing accuracy. Observe, in proof of this, the dreadful monotony of metaphysics. Read Plato, the writings of the Alexandrians, the Christian theologians from the time of the Scholastics to the present day, decipher Kant and Hegel; then turn to the oldest Indian philosophy, the oldest Egyptian speculations, as they appear in the religions of these countries; and we

find the same struggle over being and non-being, spiritual essence and material form; the same attempted difference between time and eternity; the same divine unity, one and eternal, contrasted with the changing variety of the senses. The communication of these thoughts from one nation to another has been an insensible process, which has in nowise waited for the rediscovery of languages or the new literary criticism of our day. But if language has preserved all these truths and subjected them to that development which can alone come from the general progress of knowledge, or the growth of morality, how are we to account for the apparently fixed and unyielding form which the higher speculations have assumed? Why is it that German, French, and English speculations have not surpassed in metaphysical insight the best thought of Egypt, India, and Greece? Are the people who embody the teachings of Kant, Descartes, and Spencer to be compared to those who designed the pyramids, wrote the Vedas, or questioned the Delphic Oracle? How are these nations to be compared?

The difference between civilizations is best portrayed by a comparison of the KNOWLEDGE of the respective races; but when the term knowledge is identified with life, the comparison is lost in receding equations. When, however, we put the proposition in a religious form, it will readily gain acceptance; for the assertion that races and civilizations are to be measured by the spread of the divine spirit among them, by the quality and extent of their knowledge of God, is a truism for all devout minds.

Our proposition, then, is, that the completeness and symmetry with which a nation has performed that great induction which leads from particulars to generals, from the lowest forms of sentiency to the highest generalizations, is the only true measure of its life.

If we would rise above the past, therefore, if we would place a permanent distinction between our civilization and that of the lowest savages, or the great intermediate races, we must improve our language so that its most general

terms will cease to be employed as the vehicle of superstition and mysteries. The question then arises: Can such an understanding of language be made to harmonize with any existing religion? Will not such light as this prove fatal to Christianity? In order to answer this question, it will be necessary to glance at the most prominent facts of general religious history with a view to ascertaining the immediate origin of our religious beliefs.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE RELIGIONS OF EGYPT AND INDIA.

In Egypt the Belief in Immortality Reached its Highest Development-Mysticism and Idealism.

THE Egyptians were the most pious people of antiquity. They seem to have expended more time and energy in religious observances, and to have had a more realistic conception of a future life, than any other race. Their writings, says M. Maury, "are full of sacred symbols and allusions to divine myths, perfectly useless apart from the Egyptian religion. Literature and the sciences were only branches of the theology, while its books formed a sacred code, supposed to be the work of the god Thoth, likened by the Greeks to their Hermes. The arts were only practised to add to the worship and glorification of the gods or deified kings.

"The religious observances were so numerous and so imperative that it was impossible to practise a profession, to prepare food, or to attend to the simplest daily needs without constantly calling to mind the rules established by the priests. Each province had its special gods, its particular rights, its sacred animals. Neither the dominion of the Persians, nor that of the Ptolemies, nor that of the Romans, was able to change this antique religion of the Pharaohs; of all polytheisms, it opposed the most obstinate resistance to Christianity, and continued to live on up to the sixth century of our era. It is because the Egyptian religion had penetrated so deeply into the mind of the people and the customs of the country, that it became, so to speak, a part of the intellectual and physical organization of the race."'

Alfred Maury: Revue des Deux Mondes, Sept., 1867.