230 ESSAYS SCIENTIFIC AND PHILOSOPHICAL. 



XII. 

 THEOLOGY AND LAW. 1 



" Lord, what love have I unto Thy Law : all the day long is 

 my study in it." Ps. cxix. 97. 



IT is now hardly more than half a century ago 

 that there came to England, a stranger to a 

 strange land, one 2 who in his Indian home had 

 spent his life in protests against idolatry, and in 

 earnest efforts to restore a monotheistic religion. 

 Judged as we so often judge those whom we do 

 not know, he was only a heathen, a pious Brahman 

 who, however well disposed to Christianity, died 

 in Christian England, an alien from the Christian 

 commonwealth. His language was not ours ; his 

 habits of life and thought were strange to us ; his 

 religion was not Christianity. 



But, looking earnestly beneath the surface of 

 things, working back in thought from difference to 

 unity, we find it is not altogether so. In race, 

 in language, in thought, he is nearer to us than 



1 An Assize Sermon preached before the University of Oxford 

 on the Twentieth Sunday after Trinity, 1884. 

 " Rajah Rammohun Roy. 



