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damental principles of self -culture and self-denial involve a noble 

 and spiritual conception of life, and are capable of leading to the 

 most admirable results. But, even with the obscurity that rests on 

 the beginnings of Buddhism and the moral-religious development 

 that preceded it, none of us will be inclined to deny that it is the 

 outcome of the experience and thoughts of the time. Such, also, 

 appears to be the case with the ethical codes of the Bible. The 

 ordinary social duties which are enjoined in the Old Testament and 

 New Testament, such as honesty, truthfulness, sobriety, kindness 

 to the poor, are common to many times and peoples. All the moral 

 requirements of the Decalogue are found among the Egyptians at 

 a period earlier than that usually assigned to Moses, Even the 

 nobler qualities of love to man, forgiveness of injuries, denial of 

 self, are not without parallel in other communities. In some cases 

 a process of natural development may be observed in the biblical 

 ethics. The prophets enjoin on the Israelites justice and kindness 

 to their own countrymen, but their view does not extend beyond 

 their own land ; one of the later law-books (Lev. xix, 18) contains 

 the precept, " Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," but it de- 

 fines neighbors as " the children of thy people " ; the great Jewish 

 lawyer Hillel, toward the end of the first century before the begin- 

 ning of our era, announced as the central principle of conduct that 

 a man should not do to others what he would not have them do to 

 him ; Jesus put this principle into positive shape (the same thing 

 substantially existed among the Chinese and Greeks). The ethical 

 treatise of the Egyptian Ptah-hotep, said by Maspero, Renouf, 

 and other eminent scholars to be the oldest book in the world (its 

 date is put before 2000 b. a), contains a moral code remarkable 

 for loftiness and spirituality ; it enjoins gentleness, forgetting 

 wrong, contentment, kindness, avoidance of pride, of hardness of 

 heart, and of bad temper. It would appear, from the codes of peo- 

 ples for whom no divine revelation is claimed by us, that man by 

 his unaided efforts has come to the knowledge of the best prin- 

 ciples and practices of morality, has not only made admirable 

 rules of conduct, but has perceived that the essence of goodness 

 lies in the character of the soul. If this be so, it is unnecessary 

 to suppose a supernatural divine revelation to account for the 

 ethical phenomena of society. It might be said, indeed, that all 

 this ethical development proceeds from a primitive divine reve- 

 lation. But this statement rests on no historical proof, nor would 

 it explain the fact that the ethical progress of a nation goes hand 

 in hand with its growth in civilization. If the ancient Hebrews 

 received their ethical code directly from God, whence comes it that 

 manners were milder in Ezra's time than in the pre-exilian pro- 

 phetic period, less mild in the days of David, and comparatively 

 rude in the period of the Judges ? It would be singular if the 



