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BLACKETT. 155 
conducted itself within the known region of history, and 
within the borderland that is dimly revealed by tradition, or 
more dimly still by philological analysis ? 
7. This isa vast field for investigation, and can by no means 
be said to have been fully worked as yet. But great advances 
have been made in the exploration of it. Nota few learned 
and laborious inquirers have for the last seventy years been 
engaged in digging out the remains of old religions from amid 
the débris of popular traditions, of sacred books in forgotten 
languages, and of those languages themselves in which curious 
relics of still older strata had become imbedded. ‘The Quran, 
the Tripitaka, the Zendavesta, the Vedas have been studied 
and analysed. The hieroglyphics of Hgypt, the wedge-covered 
slabs and bricks of Nineveh and Babylon, the rock-inscriptions 
of Persia and of India have yielded up their secrets. The 
traditions of the Aztecs and the Zulus, the wild ideas and 
wilder practices of the Tartars, the Red Indians, and even the 
Australian aborigines, have been collected and compared, not 
without results. Mythologies, Greek, Keltic, Scandinavian, 
and Indian, have been drawn together, and have supplied 
much interesting information. The primitive Aryan culture 
has been pieced out from the scattered elements of the Aryan 
tongues, and attempts in the same direction have been made 
with the Semitic. Altogether, much has been done in follow- 
ing out the course that religions have generally taken, so far 
as their history can in any way be traced. A mass of facts 
has been accumulated, too great almost for any one man to’ 
become acquainted with, at least without risk of portions 
being distorted through unequal approximation to the point 
of view. The Aryan scholar may magnify Aryan charac- 
teristics, the Semitic may take a wrong view of non-Semitic 
religions, owing to his famiharity with Semitic modes of 
thought. Moreover, the conclusions of all these scholars 
need to be checked again and again, and modified by a 
general acquaintance with other branches of culture, and, 
last but not least, by common sense. On the whole, the 
sorting and classifying of the accumulated and accumulating 
materials for the science of religions is a matter which will 
require as much skill, as much patience, and more breadth of 
mind than the collecting of them has demanded. Mean- 
while, the vast array of facts should daunt a little the bold- 
ness of conjecture. No man has any right to lay down his 
own theory as to the origin of religion as unquestionably the 
right one, until he has shown its agreement with the history 
of the various religions as now made known. ‘The dense 
and far-reaching forest of historical facts bearing on religion 
VOL. XIX. M 
