questionable sense. Any distinction thus indicated must lie within the limits of each and every religion taken by itself. It cannot mark off one positive religion from another, still less one from the rest; since, whatever meanings be given to these terms, every such religion will be found to have its own spiritual and natural sides, if any one has them. Christianity is nevertheless constantly opposed, as False pre tensions set a "spiritual" religion, to the earlier faiths, as up for Chris- merely natural ones; as if there were some tianity. essential contradiction to truth and good in our human nature, which was abolished by the advent of Jesus. The history of religion, so far from teaching such a schism between the human and the divine, -or this bridging over at a certain epoch of a gulf which, by its very definition, was impassable, — demonstrates the exact contrary, a substantial unity of God and Man beneath all outward alienations. It points to perfection in the laws of human nature, under all the varying phases of human character; to constitutional health unshaken by the diseases incident to growth; to moral and spiritual recuperation, as human as the vices that required it; to divine immanence, under finite conditions, from the beginning onwards. Universal Religion, then, cannot be any one, exclusively, of the great positive religions of the world. Yet it is really what is best in each and every one of them; purified from baser inter-mixture and developed in freedom and power. Being the purport of nature, it has been germinating in every vital energy of man; so that its elements exist, at some stage of evolution, in every great religion of mankind. Where is the If any belief fails to abide this test, the worse for its "If that were true claims on our religious nature. which is commonly taken for granted," wrote Cudworth, "that the generality of the Pagan nations. acknowledged no sovereign numen, but scattered their devotions amongst a multitude of independent deities, this would much have stumbled the naturality of the divine idea;" an effect equivalent, in his large and clear mind, to disproval of the divineness itself. As distinctive Christianity was in fact but a single step in a for ever unfolding process, so those Rights of the earlier beliefs are disparaged when they are older Faiths. made to point to it as their final cause. They stand, as it has stood, in their own right; justified, as it has been, by meeting, each in its own day and on its own soil, the demands of human nature. They point forward, but not to a single and final revelation entering history from without their line, and reversing at once their whole process in its new dealing with their attained results. They point forward; but it is with the prophecy of an endless progress, which no distinctive name, symbol, authority, or even ideal, can foreclose. They are misrepresented, when they are held to be mere "forerunners" or "types" in the interest of a later faith, which has in fact entered into the fruit of their labors, and in due season transmits its own best to the fresh forces that are opening up a larger unity, and already demanding a new name and a broader communion. They are misrepresented, when, to contrast them with what is simply a successor, they are called "preparations for the truth of God." The exigencies of Christian dogma have required that they should even be described as mere "fallacies of human reason," tending inevitably to despair; a charge re 1 Preface to Intellectual System of the Universe. futed alike by the laws of science and the facts of history, since man never did, and never can, despair. Prejudices of this nature, inherent, it would seem, in the make-up of a distinctive religion, which forbid its disciples to render justice to other forms of faith, are rapidly yielding to the larger scope and freer method. of inquiry peculiar to our times. sentation of them. Every historical religion embodies the sacred personMisrepre- ality of man; announcing his infinite relations to life, duty, destiny. Yet it has been an almost invariable instinct of the Christian world to ignore this presence of the soul in her own phases of belief, and to hold "heathenism" to be her natural foe. However non-Christian morality and sentiment may have harmonized with what is best in the New Testament, it has seldom been accorded the name of revelation. Although there is always a comparatively intelligent orthodoxy, which assents to the idea of a divine immanence in all ages, yet the divinity thus recognized being, after all," the Christ," and moreover the Christ of especial tradition, and, further still, this Christ in a merely preliminary and provisional form, there can be but little freedom in such appreciation of the faith or virtue extant in non-Christian ages. A mode of presenting these, not unlike that of the early apologists of the Church, is common even with writers of the socalled liberal sects; while, with the more exclusive ones, to praise the heathen being regarded as despoiling Christianity, it is an easy step to the inference that Christianity is exalted by referring heathenism to the category of delusions and snares. And it is not too much to say, upon the whole, that the most affirmative treatment of the older religions would hardly suffice to adjust the balance fairly, and to place them on their real merits before the conscience of a civilization which has, until very recently, expended almost all its hospitality on the claims of Christianity alone.1 Many of those who write in the interest of denominational efforts have trained themselves to shrink from no assumptions in the line of their purpose; while others are blinded by its logic to the most patent facts of history. It has been common to deny boldly that moral and religious truth had any positive existence for the human mind before the Christian epoch; to assume that the Sermon on the Mount actually introduced into human nature that very love and trust to whose preexisting power in the hearts of its hearers it could itself have been but an appeal. As if ideal principles could have been imported into man by a special teacher, or be traced back to some moment of arrival, like commercial samples or inventions in machinery! So powerful is a traditional religious belief to efface the perception that every moral truth man can apprehend must be the outgrowth of his own nature, and has al 1 We may mention, as in striking contrast to this general record of Christendom, such works as Dupuis' Origines de Tous les Cultes, Constant's De la Religion, Creuzer's Symbolik, Duncker's Geschichte des Alterthums, Cousin's Lectures and Fragments on the History of Philosophy, Denis' Théories et Idées Morales dans l'Antiquité, Quinet's Génie des Religions, Michelet's Bible de l'Humanité, Menard's Morale avant les Philosophes, Mrs. Child's Progress of Religious Ideas, and R. W. Mackay's Progress of the Intellect. To these, in the special field of Oriental Literature, we must add the Shemitic studies of Renan and Michel Nicolas; and those of Abel Rémusat, Rückert, Lassen, Roth, and Müller, on the remoter Eastern races. All of these are distinguished from the mass of writers on this theme by a spirit of universality, which proves how far the scholarship of this age has advanced beyond the theological narrowness of Bossuet, the critical superficiality of Voltaire, and the hard negation of the so-called rationalistic schools of Lobeck and Voss. But it is to be observed that these scholars are still reputed heretical, and stand in disfavor with distinctive Christianity in exact proportion to their historical impartiality. Of unequalled significance are Lessing's Treatise on the Education of the Human Race, and Herder's Ideas of a Philosophy of Man; works of marvellous breadth, freedom, and insight, to which, more than to any other historical and literary influences, we must assign the parentage of modern thought in this direction. Heine finely says of Herder, that, "instead of inquisitorially judging nations according to the degree of their faith, he regarded humanity as a harp in the hands of a great master, and each people a special string, helping to the harmony of the whole." ways been seeking to reach expression, with greater or less success. Until very recently it was the most confident commonplace of New England preaching that all positive belief in immortality came into the world with Jesus. And it is still repeated, as a fact beyond all question, that no other religion besides Christianity ever taught men to bear each other's burdens, or preached a gospel to the poor. Nor has there been wanting a somewhat discreditable form of special pleading, for the purpose of reducing the claims of heathenism to the smallest possible amount; a grudging literalism, a strict construction, or a base rendering, of ancient beliefs; which would prove every apparent spiritual perception a phantom of fancy or blind hope, or else a mirage reflected from the idealism of the present on the background of the past. Resolving the fair imaginations and delicate divinations of the childlike races into mockery betrays, however, far more scepticism in the critic than in the race he wrongs. The same disposition has often arisen from philosophical prejudice. Thus the desire of Locke to disprove the notion of innate ideas led him to a degree of unbelief in this direction, which has had noticeable effect on subsequent thought. But we have yet to mention one of the worst effects of traditional religion on the treatment of history. It is still held consistent with Christian scholarship to deny moral earnestness and practical conviction to the noblest thinkers of antiquity, in what they have affirmed of the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of man. They were "theorists, not believers ; " " talked finely about virtues, but failed to apply them;" "gave |