772 ECCLESIASTICAL INSTITUTIONS. 



use of extinct tongues by Jews and by Bom an Catholics 

 for religious services, and the retention of an ancient language 

 as a sacred language by the Copts, and the like use by 

 the Egyptian priests of an archaic type of writing, we 

 have illustrations furnished by the uncivilized. Schoolcra ft 

 smys of the Creeks that their old language (the Seminole) ia 

 taught by women to the children as a kind of religious 

 duty.&quot; In Dahomey, too, the priest &quot; pronounces an allocu 

 tion in the unintelligible hierarchic tongue.&quot; And the origin 

 of Japanese Buddhism &quot;is shown to this day in the repetition 

 of prayers in an unknown language, and the retention of an 

 Indian alphabet and writing the Sanscrit or Devanagari 

 in all the religious works of Japan.&quot; This same 



tendency was variously exemplified among the Hebrews ; as 

 we see in the prescription of unhewn stone for altars 

 (Exod. xx, 25-6), the use of unleavened bread for offerings 

 (Judges, vi, 19-21), and the interdict on building a temple in 

 place of the primitive tent and tabernacle alleged to have 

 been the divine habitation in earlier days (2 Sam. vii, 4-6). 

 And a like persistence was shown in Greece. Religious 

 institutions, says Grote, &quot; often continued unaltered through 

 out all the political changes.&quot; 



Of course while thus resisting changes of usage, ecclesi 

 astical functionaries have resisted with equal or greater 

 strenuousness, changes of beliefs; since any revolution in the 

 inherited body of beliefs, tends in some measure to shake all 

 parts of it, by diminishing the general authority of ancestral 

 teaching. This familiar aspect of ecclesiastical conservatism, 

 congruous with the aspects above exemplified, it is needless 

 to illustrate. 



627. Again, then, the ghost-theory yields us the needful 

 clue. As, before, we found that all religious observances may 

 be traced back to funeral observances ; so here, we find these 

 influences which ecclesiastical institutions exert, have their 

 germs in the influences exerted by the feelings entertained 



