THE SCIENCE OF RELIGION. 323 



" Christ came to bring Life and Immortality to light." But it 

 also most beautifully and touch ingly says, "And Abraham believed 

 God, and it was counted unto him for Righteousness." The 

 simple faith of these righteous men in the one God who ruled 

 over the House of Israel is justly held to be their passport to 

 glories they did not anticipate or dream of in their day. 



A thousand years before the time of Abraham the Hindoos 

 worshiped the one god Brahma as " Him who had existed from 

 all eternity, infinitely wise, infinitely benign, and infinitely pow- 

 erful." Shall this highest and purest faith of all the ancient 

 systems be accounted to them for nothing in the great and final 

 reckoning? All the cultivated nations of antiquity except the 

 Jews recognized the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. 

 And very many upright men among them, as we know from 

 the classical studies of our school days, sought the reward of an 

 everlasting life of happiness in the worship of the gods they 

 believed in and in the practice of virtue and good works. Shall 

 their faith and efforts, feeble it may be, but corresponding to the 

 light that was in them, go for naught in the great and final Day 

 of the Lord ? 



I think we may proceed to search out the antecedents of 

 Christianity and to gather together whatever there was of good 

 and Scripture-like in the religions of the olden times, not only 

 without fear of injuring the cause of the true Faith, but with 

 the conviction that the more the similitudes and the clearer the 

 foreshado wings that we may find, the more w r ill the Christian 

 Religion be relieved from the great and radical objection so often 

 urged against it, that it came only within the last one-third of 

 the world's historic age, and has not been made known to one in 

 thousands of those who have lived. 



Scattered here and there among the crudities and abstruse 

 speculations which the ancient philosophers, such as Pythagoras, 

 Aristotle and Socrates, have sent down to us, there are to be found 

 a great many precepts and doctrines that read very much like 

 many tilings we have been accustomed to think were first written 

 in the manuscript of the New Testament. In order to show this 

 I will make a few selections from the writings and the accounts 



