14S THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



remarks, the book of the Old Testament farthest removed from Jew- 

 ish particularism, and most nearly approaching to Christian Catho- 

 licity ; and this should be ample compensation for the sacrifice of its 

 miraculous and sui^ernatural part. M. Francis Lenormant has applied 

 the same method in his studies on the " Origins of History according 

 to the Bible and the Traditions of the Oriental Peoples." " I do not 

 recognize," he writes, " a Christian science and a freethinking science ; 

 I admit only one science, the one that has no need of any other epithet, 

 which lays aside theological questions as foreign to its domain, and of 

 which all seekers in good faith are the servitors, whatever may be their 

 relisrious convictions. That is the science to which I have consecrated 

 my life ; and I believe it would be a violation of a holy duty of con- 

 science if, influenced by a preoccupation of another kind, however 

 worthy of respect, I should hesitate to speak sincerely and without 

 ambiguity the truth as I discern it." 



It is nevertheless true that hitherto orthodoxies have hardly shown 

 themselves disposed to understand the rights of science in this way. 



If religious prejudice opposes itself to the scientific study of one's 

 own religion, can it also interpose an obstacle to the knowledge of 

 strange religions ? At first thought we might be tempted to answer 

 in the negative. How can any opinions, even those which we hold as 

 absolute truth, prevent us from observing, classifying, and describing 

 the beliefs, or, if you prefer, the errors of another? 



It is a fact that, if we arrange all religious opinions in two cate- 

 gories — that of our own, which we believe came down ready-made 

 from heaven, and that of the religions of others, which we declare 

 indiscriminately to be the results of perversions — we become incapable 

 of grasping the real nature of the religious sentiment, and conse- 

 quently of its different manifestations. With the Iranians, who per- 

 sonify their supreme being in the great Ahura, the devas represent 

 the agents of the bad principles. To the Brahmans, who adored the 

 devas, the cisuras were the adversaries of gods and men. To the 

 historian of religions, asuras and devas are analogous conceptions, 

 which a priori he connects with the normal development of the 

 human mind, and a 2'>osteriori shows to have been derived from 

 the same religious center, anterior to the separation of the Persians 

 and the Indians, and to the organization of dualism in the Aryan 

 theologies. 



How shall we preserve the even mind and the freedom of appre- 

 ciation essential to all impartial analysis of foreign ideas and customs, 

 if we imagine, like some of the fathers, that they are the work of the 

 evil-one ? The Christians of the first centuries had no doubt of the 

 real existence of the pagan divinities, but they regarded them as evil 

 spirits who had turned the worship of men from the only God by a 

 caricature of the true religion. Such is likewise the recent explana- 

 tion given by Father Hue of the curious resemblances which he dis- 



