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nexion with g-rowth in religion, " A development there is ; 

 but is it a development upward^ or a development downward 

 (downward, I mean^ as in the case of saint-worship and other 

 deformities that have clustered round the design of the 

 founder of Christianity) ? It is not easy to see with Mr. 

 Herbert Spencer by what law or necessity of man^s nature he 

 should^ after having evolved his gods from the " stuff that 

 dreams are made of/^ proceed to evolve the necessity for pro- 

 pitiating them with bloody sacrifices. Men do not propitiate 

 each other, and I suppose, in no age ever even dreamed of 

 doing so, with bloody offerings. Nor is it by any means easy 

 to see with Mr, Moncure Conway how the struggle between 

 the principles of " retaliation and forgiveness " in the human 

 bosom could, according to his theory, beget the germ of the 

 sacrificial system, and especially how it should have pointed 

 out food animals and food plants as the only suitable 

 offerings. 



" The only natural law which the science of religion has 

 forced upon my own conviction is, that man has exhibited a 

 constant tendency to drop the spiritual out of religion, while 

 he may retain the material. Deterioration from the original 

 truth seems to have been the natural order of growth in 

 religions. It was certainly so in the religion of Israel. It 

 has been certainly so in the history of Christianity. The truth 

 of the Founder has often been kept up only by an eflfort, and 

 how often by a painful effort. I believe the same may be 

 shown to be true of every known religion. But this does not 

 mean utter destruction. Vestiges of the original will most 

 probably remain, more or less extensive, more or less perfect. 

 It is the spiritual that suffers ; we more easily preserve the 

 skeleton than the life that once animated it. And as regards 

 concretions^ just as, when we ascend the stream towards the 

 fountain in Christianity, we drop sect after sect, heresy after 

 heresy, so in Hinduism, when we march back to the Vedic 

 era, we leave one by one the gods many and the lords many, 

 till we reach a clearer atmosphere. When there, with a less 

 incumbered reahsation of deity, what do we find ? We find 

 what I take to be the most remarkable and noteworthy of all 

 the results of our research, I mean, what is evidently the 

 backbone of the religion, that has, moreover, existed to this 

 day through all changes, — the Priest, the Altar, the Sacrifice, 

 the Oblation, the Propitiation, the Sacred Feast, all connected 

 with the acknowledgment of deity. Here, then, we must 

 have reached the ideal, or a portion of the ideal, of original 

 Hinduism. However imperfect and skeleton - like these 



