332 THE SCIENCE OF RELIGION. 



interpreting those scriptures, the same order and manner of per- 

 forming public worship which afterwards were practiced by the 

 Christians. Eusebins says their psalms and hymns were the very 

 same that were used in the church in his day. They had mis- 

 sionary stations or churches in precisely the same places as were 

 those addressed by St. Paul, as Rome, Corinth, Ephesus, &c. 

 Eusebius ends his account of them as follows : " That Philo 

 wrote these tilings with reference to those who were the first 

 preachers of the discipline which is according to the Gospel and 

 to the manners first handed down from the apostles, must be 

 manifest to every man." But Philo wrote this history, and all 

 the things he described existed, long before there was a word of 

 the New Testament written. Philo does not in any of his 

 works mention the name or refer in the remotest manner to 

 Christ or to Christians. Mosheim the great ecclesiastical histor- 

 ian says, " It was here (in Egypt) that the Essenes dwelt princi- 

 pally, long before the coming of Christ : " " that the Ascetic 

 philosophy was in a flourishing state in Alexandrea when our 

 Saviour was upon earth." Evidently then these societies were 

 the forerunners, the antecedents of Christianity. And if their 

 votaries could not be distinguished from real and true Christians 

 by an eminent church historian of the fourth century, shall we 

 of the nineteenth presume to say they had no part in the promises 

 of the new religion to which they contributed so large a share 

 of principles and observances ? 



If it might be permitted to predicate for religions, as it is for 

 civilizations and governments, an element of evolution, that is 

 of the more perfect following and developing out of the cruder 

 and less advanced, then many difficulties might be removed that 

 now are stumbling blocks. I think' we have shown quite conclu- 

 sively that the Christian religion was not only a great reform of 

 the Jewish, but that it adopted in an improved form many of the 

 tenets, observances and traditions of the classical and oriental 

 religions that preceded it. Again in the great Reformation of 

 the 16th century, Knox, Calvin and Luther introduced doctrines 

 and elements of advance that had never been previously promul- 

 gated. The Christian religion of to-day is as much superior to 



