THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGIONS. 



149 



covered between the rites of Buddhist worship and some of the prac- 

 tices of Roman Catholicism. 



It would be unjust to award to Christendom the monopoly of 

 intolerance. The Emir Hakem had collected at Cordova a great num- 

 ber of books which had been found in the East among the ruins of 

 paganism. The usurper Al-Mansour had them torn up and burned. 

 Those which escaped this reaction of Mussulman fanaticism perished, 

 three centuries later, with eighty thousand manuscripts that Roman 

 Catholic fanaticism caused to be thrown into the flames of Granada, 

 after the expulsion of the Moors.* Even the Protestants are not free 

 from reproach in this matter. Sir George Mackenzie relates, in his 

 " Travels in Iceland," that the Lutheran clergy used all its power to 

 prevent the first publication of the " Eddas," the ancient epics of 

 Scandinavian mythology. 



Greeks and Trojans were not more bitter in their disputes over the 

 body of Patroclus than Protestants and Catholics in wresting honestly 

 the texts of the fathers and the monuments of the Catacombs to 

 deduce from them the justification of their respective views on the 

 questions in controversy between them. What should we exjDect, 

 then, when the question is one of giving to a rival cult the place 

 which legitimately belongs to it in the development of man ? Bishop 

 Huet would find but few imitators in this age of his efforts to dis- 

 cover Moses in the persons of Zoroaster, Orpheus, Apollo, Vulcan, 

 Faunus, Thoth, Adonis, and Tammuz.f But even the best-informed 

 and most sincere apologists allow themselves to exaggerate the an- 

 tiquity of the Hebrew traditions while looking for the source or the 

 afiiliations of the biblical stories. 



Thus, we had long known, from fragments of ancient authors, that 

 the Babylonians had a cycle of legends presenting some analogies with 

 the traditions of Genesis. They were generally believed to be an 

 infiltration or a vague echo of the Mosaic account. But in 1872 Mr. 

 George Smith deciphered from a Ninevite tablet an account of the 

 deluge, which was singularly like the Hebrew version in the details of 

 the composition, the course of the narration, and the style. The pri- 

 ority of this document to the first book of the Bible seems established 

 in evidence. Lenormant declares that it must have been composed 

 several centuries before Moses. The Babylonian version illustrates 

 the original signification of the tradition, by showing it to be a myth 

 of a great storm or of the rainy season ; while, in the Mosaic version, 

 the naturalistic character almost disappears under the more elevated 

 interpretation, conceived from the moral and monotheistic point of 

 view. We, therefore, seem authorized to conclude that, if the story in 

 Genesis is not derived directly from the Chaldean tradition, the latter 



* Emest Renan, " Averroes et I'Avcrroism," pp. 4, 60. 



f But we have recently seen — probably by way of reprisal — M. Jacolliot finding in 

 Moses, as well as in Menes and Minos, the Manu of India. 



