33 



it appears to me that there is one point which the author of the present 

 paper has not brought out with sufficient distinctness, but which the facts 

 actually prove to have been the case, namely, that the further we go back 

 in the history of these ancient nations the more clear it appears to be that 

 the religious principle was originally based on the monotheistic idea. It 

 seems to me that in those early times the primary spiritual ideas con- 

 nected with religion are more clearly displayed, and that, especially in the 

 case of Egypt, the further we go back the more unmistakably do we find that, 

 just as the Egyptian architecture was more pure and perfect in the earliest 

 periods, so were the religious ideas of the Egyptian people of a purer and 

 more perfect nature. The same remark will apply to the Assyrian religion ; 

 but, as to the Persian and Chinese religions, I can hardly speak of them 

 because I have not studied them. I think that the more we study the 

 points set forth in this paper the more does the author, who is so far removed 

 from all intercourse with modern thought and from the opportunities 

 afforded by the libraries and other aids we have around us, appear to demand 

 our sympathy and admiration for having so ably thought out and discussed 

 these matters. There is one point on page 13 of the paper which struck 

 me. The author says : " The force of this important series of facts 

 is not invalidated nor weakened by the consideration that in some of the 

 cases referred to the objects of worship were spurious ; but it is rather 

 strengthened by the fact that so dominant is the sense of need, and so 

 prevalent the persuasion of the possibility of access to God, on whom we 

 depend, that when all true knowledge of Him was lost and only false sub- 

 stitutes for the living God existed, which could not help, yet, even then, the 

 practice of worship was continued through successive generations of dis- 

 appointment, all of whom were ready to ascribe the failure to the imperfec- 

 tion of the worship rather than to the impotence or the indifference of their 

 gods." The author here puts in a striking form the argument that human 

 nature cannot do without a power outside of and superior to itself, as 

 Matthew Arnold says, " A not-ourselves that makes for righteousness." We 

 cannot do without something beyond ourselves which will help us to fight 

 for the right ; we are bound to acknowledge the necessity for an appeal to 

 that Power for whose aid we feel, as poor human creatures, we stand in need. 

 On page 15 the author travels over the same ground to that which I have 

 traversed in a paper read before this Institute, namely, that we are not to 

 look upon God as a mere abstraction of the human intellect, or a creation of 

 our own minds, but as a concrete Being, the source of all life, a Being outside 

 and beyond ourselves, who has created us, and who brought the whole world 

 into existence. There is another point, also, which seems worthy of 

 notice, and that is on page 17, where the author states that the God, 

 " who has so made and ordered all our bodily members as to suit the con- 

 ditions- in which He has placed us, cannot have given higher faculties than 

 sensation and intellect, to leave them without a possibility of exercise, by 

 failing to respond to a faculty which He has given for no other purpose but 

 as a means of access to Himself, and the attainment of knowledge concern- 

 6 



